Mercy

by David L Lindsey

  She lived alone in the southwest quadrant of the village, just inside its limits. Having recently split up with her boyfriend, she was enjoying her newly recovered privacy, not having to worry about looking out for another person’s clothes—either clean or dirty—or another person’s books or records or combs or socks or favorite cookies or bicycle or breakfast cereal. Everything was hers again, only hers, and she knew where she put things and why. If she got lonely she would have a friend over, or she would go over to a friend’s without having to worry about whether he was going to feel excluded or, if he went along, whether their personalities were going to clash or if he might decide to be boorish because he hadn’t wanted to go in the first place, but didn’t have the resourcefulness to stay at home alone and entertain himself for a change. In short, she was once again enjoying the pleasures of selfishness.

  Just as she turned into her street, she met the paperboy tossing white rolls of newspaper through the morning darkness into dew-dampened yards, and with her windows down she heard faint whumps as an occasional paper hit a tree or slammed into front porch steps. She pulled into her driveway, rolled up the windows, and got out and locked the car. Exhausted, she walked across the damp grass, picked up her newspaper, and walked up the sidewalk to the front door of her small wood-frame house. It was painted a light green with forest green trim and forest green canvas awnings. She had mortgaged the house with her own salary, had it made energy-efficient on a payment plan. She mowed the small lawn herself. She was proud of the place and liked the neighborhood.

  Unlocking the front door, she pushed it open, kicked off her white nursing shoes, and tossed the newspaper over onto the sofa across the small living room. She would look at it right there in that spot in a few hours, with a cinnamon roll from the neighborhood bakery and a nice strong cup of coffee. But right now all she wanted was to take a long shower with lots of scented soap to wash off the emergency room odors, and then to crawl between the cool sheets.

  Unbuttoning the blouse of her white uniform, she stepped across the small hallway off the living room and turned the corner into her bedroom. The moment before she flipped on the light, she smelled the perfume—not her perfume. That simple fact registered like a cold blade of fear going into the back of her neck at the very same instant that the ceiling light flung up the naked, pasty cadaver of a woman in her bed, her face painted like a great grotesque doll, eyes staring round and bulging, bloody breasts, and a queerly refined and proper posture.

  Prim horror.

  The telephone rang four or five times before Palma fought her way to the surface of consciousness and groped for the receiver. As she said, “This is Carmen,” she saw that the digital clock read three fifty-five.

  “You’re man’s done another one,” Lieutenant Corbeil said.

  “Jesus Christ.” Her mouth was dry, and Corbeil’s words had the effect of the first roiling sensations of nausea. “What…what about Reynolds?”

  “He didn’t move.”

  Palma swallowed. “He didn’t move? He…what about Broussard?” She was holding her head in her hand. “Did they get the tail on Broussard?”

  “Yeah, but he didn’t go anywhere either,” Corbeil said.

  Palma was incredulous. “Are they sure? I mean, who was on him?”

  “Martin and Hisdale, but I don’t think I’d question their…”

  “Goddamn, Arvey, it was just a question.” God, how could it not be either one of them?

  “And there’s something odd about your victim,” Corbeil said. Palma was irritated that Corbeil kept saying “your man” and “your victim.” Why the hell had he started that? “Victim doesn’t live in the house where she was found. Place belongs to a single woman, a nurse who found her when she came in from her shift at Ben Taub about twenty minutes ago.”

  “She doesn’t know the victim?” Palma asked, sitting up on the edge of the bed, looking at her wrinkled dress, trying to remember.

  “Says she doesn’t know if she does or not. Couldn’t tell with the makeup and all,” Corbeil said. “Thirty-twenty-six Blane. Practically in your own back yard.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Palma said again. “Okay, I’m on my way as soon as I wash up.”

  “Say,” Corbeil said quickly, “you know where Grant is? I’ve called his room at the hotel, but he doesn’t answer.”

  “I don’t know,” she said crossly. “Try it again.” She hung up and ran her fingers through her hair, cursing Corbeil’s impertinence. Or she thought it was impertinence. She stood up slowly and went into the bathroom and washed her face with cold water, came out patting her face with a towel, ran a brush through her hair, and started down the stairs, still dabbing at her face. She went into the living room and saw their plates still on the coffee table, and then she turned and went across the hall to the guest room. The door was open and she stepped in and saw Grant standing at the bathroom sink in his suit pants but without a shirt, washing his face.

  “I listened on the telephone down here,” he said quickly, turning off the water. “I’ll be ready in a few minutes.”

  She stared at him. When she didn’t leave the doorway, he turned and looked at her.

  “You all right?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” she said, holding the towel to her mouth. “I don’t remember going up to bed.”

  “I carried you up,” he said, trying to act as if it was nothing, quickly turning back to the mirror to comb his hair. “You kind of conked out.”

  “I passed out?”

  “I’d say you just went to sleep.”

  Palma looked at him a moment. “I, uh, I don’t drink too well,” she said.

  “I’m sorry you had to sleep in your dress,” Grant said, striding out of the bathroom and grabbing his shirt from the back of a chair near his bed. Palma noticed his bed had been slept in. She also noticed his build, surprised at the thickness of his chest and shoulders. He slipped on the shirt and hurriedly started buttoning it. “But I thought…you’d rather.”

  Palma nodded. “Right,” she said stupidly. “It’ll take me just a second to throw on some fresh things.” And she turned and hurried out of the room.

  Blane Street was not exactly in Palma’s back yard, as Corbeil put it, but it was eighteen blocks away, just inside the city limits of West University Place. As with the murder of Bernadine Mello in Hunters Creek, the village police were well aware of the serial killings and contacted Houston homicide immediately. Because of their proximity, Palma and Grant were the first ones there except for several radio units, their doors flung open, radios barking, flashers bouncing off the small neighboring houses in the predawn darkness.

  “Stop back here,” Grant said quickly, and Palma slowed and pulled to the curb, cutting her lights and stopping several car lengths back from the house. Grant quickly got out of the car and stalked toward the house, reaching for his shield to hang outside his suit coat pocket. He headed straight for the patrolman stringing plastic ribbon around the entire perimeter of the yard to the front sidewalk.

  “Excuse me,” he said, stopping the officer, laying a hand on his shoulder. He introduced himself. “Anybody inside?”

  “One officer, just inside the front door. Officer Saldana over there in the patrol unit with the homeowner was first on the scene.”

  Grant nodded. “Listen, I think it’d be a good idea to put that ribbon all the way across the street to the opposite curb. Maybe two car lengths either side of the property. Move your patrol units outside the ribbon, too. It’s likely this guy came and left by car, maybe stopped out here somewhere, maybe raked something out into the street when he got out. Could’ve dropped something along the curb. We want to keep it restricted, keep people from driving all over it until we’ve had time to search it properly,” he said. “Give us plenty of room.”

  Immediately other patrol units started arriving and the patrolman and Grant started waving them back away from the front of the house, recruiting another officer to help them enlarge the scene.
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br />   Palma walked over to the patrol unit parked behind a car in the driveway. Its doors were open for air, its interior lights making it a lighted bubble in the morning darkness. Palma saw that the officer was a woman and that the woman with her was wearing a nurse’s uniform. She approached the car and motioned for the officer to get out. A stout Chicana, Officer Saldana wore a practical ponytail and had an efficient manner.

  She told Palma the woman’s name was Hardeman, gave her occupation and the circumstances surrounding the discovery of the body. She confirmed the fact that Hardeman didn’t know who the victim was, and that the house was locked when she arrived home. She said when she arrived at the scene and saw what it was, she simply got Hardeman out to the car and closed up the house. She didn’t even look to see if the victim had a purse so she could check ID. Palma thanked her as Grant walked up, and the two of them started up the sidewalk to the opened front door where they spoke to the officer guarding the door and went in.

  Palma quickly looked around Janice Hardeman’s living room and what she could see of the dining room and kitchen. The windows of the house were thrown open, causing the temperature to be ambient with the cool early morning. Because the air was not being filtered, the humidity enhanced the surrounding odors, the pungent smell of older furniture and the specific redolence of old houses that differs with each one as distinctly as fingerprints.

  Hardeman was not an exacting housekeeper, certainly not as organized as the businesslike Dorothy Samenov, nor was she as conscientious about picking up a blouse or slip that she shed as soon as she came in the front door as Bernadine Mello’s maids had been about looking after her casually tossed clothing. The rooms were not sloppy or ill-kept, only comfortably lived in with an apparent I’ll-get-to-it-later lifestyle.

  Palma’s stomach was already tightening in anticipation of what she was going to see as she and Grant crossed the hall to the bedroom. She smelled the perfume almost immediately at the bedroom door, and then she saw the pallid body in the same funereal posture she already had seen three times before. By now Grant knew the details of the killer’s techniques by heart, and together they entered the room looking for the familiar telltale mannerisms or any deviations from them.

  The bedroom was not large, and the bathroom was not contiguous, but was around the corner in the hall. There was a large closet without doors so that the clothes hung on the racks open to the bedroom. A long, low clothes chest was against one wall across from the foot of the bed, and in the corner between the end of the chest and the wall was the top sheet and bedspread that had been stripped off the bed. On its far side, the bed was relatively close to a row of windows, and an old wooden armchair sat between the bed and the windows. It appeared to serve as a makeshift table for reading material, since it was stacked with magazines and a couple of books. On top of the books and magazines was a neatly folded set of women’s clothes. On the near side of the bed was a bedside stand, a junk store “antique” with a marble top and a compartment below. The little table held a telephone, alarm clock, and a box of tissues.

  They both moved to the bed. Grant stood beside her, hands in his pockets, his own thoughts shrouded in a grim frown. Then he broke the silence.

  “Sandra Moser was thirty-four. Dorothy Samenov, thirty-eight; Bernadine Mello, forty-two. I thought we had something going there, each woman getting older. But this one,” he really couldn’t tell anything about her face, “from her general physique it looks like she’s twenty-three, twenty-four.”

  Palma was beginning to feel strange. The body was vaguely familiar, the build of it, the long legs and even the woman’s groin, the color of her pubes…the color of her pubes…Stunned, Palma jerked her eyes sideways to the woman’s hair. She was not a true blond, for her hair had a sandy, reddish cast to it, the color of ginger.

  “My God,” she said, and reflexively put a hand out to touch Grant’s arm, then quickly withdrew it. “Jesus.” She studied the woman’s dollish face and tried to see beneath the makeup, beyond the distortion caused by the swelling, beyond the distracting gape of the lidless eyes. “I think this is Vickie Kittrie,” she said.

  “You think?” Grant’s voice was calm.

  “I recognize…the hair.” She had almost said “vulva.”

  These deaths were spreading their strangeness even into her own life. Could she ever have imagined that she would one day identify another woman by the general nature of her vulva? She remembered—two, three days earlier? Four?—sitting in the tapestried armchair in Helena Saulnier’s house and watching Vickie, willingly naked from the waist down, pluck her own pubic hair, one at a time, from her carefully barbered pubis. She looked at Vickie’s groin now and remembered that, remembered noting the overall effect of that scene, the long, milky thighs that Vickie had to spread slightly to get to the hair on the outer lips of her vagina. Had that incident made more of an impression on her than she wanted to admit? Had she been moved unconsciously by what she had seen, while consciously she had not given it a second thought, had even “forgotten” it? How the hell could she recognize a woman’s groin if it had not made an extraordinary impression on her?

  “It’s Vickie,” she said, and her eyes were already taking in the quarter-size wounds where Vickie’s nipples had been and the discolored suck marks that dotted her abdomen and inner thighs like the maculae of typhus, symptoms of a sickness. These were the signs of a singular disease, a fatal virus that never killed its host and never infected its victims. Her eyes quickly had passed over all these wounds and scars, markers of the killer’s mind, and had locked onto Vickie’s navel and the distinctive bite and suck marks that ringed it—and one additional, and grotesque, feature that she had not immediately recognized in her surprise at identifying Kittrie. The navel itself, the inner coil, the snubbed end of what once had been the umbilical tie between the lives of mother and child and through which they had shared genetics and life, past and present and future, was a moist, extruding wound where the killer had sucked out the cicatrix.

  From the corner of her eye she was aware of Grant looking over at her, perhaps alerted by her silence, then following her eyes to Kittrie’s stomach. He quickly moved around closer, buttoning his double-breasted coat to keep his tie from getting onto the body when he bent over. He examined the wound where her navel had been, tilting his head this way and that like a curious bird. Palma did not have to examine it so closely; she did not have to see the minute rippled impressions left by the serrated edges of his teeth that she knew lay in the subsurface of the scalded ring of his bite. Those were the fait accompli, and she had already memorized those. What her mind craved were the images she could never have, the sight of him bent over her stomach, the words of their strange foreplay, the sounds of sexual urges gone awry and that had led to an even stranger death. But what she could not witness, she could not avoid imagining. Vickie’s senses, the coppery taste of raw fear, the smells of their sweaty intercourse, sounds of his distorted sexual greed, what she saw him do to her as she strained in disbelief over the top of her breasts, what she felt when he placed his mouth over her navel and bit and sucked with enough rage to eviscerate her.

  Grant straightened up, had a second thought, and bent down again and felt the sheet along the edges of the body on both sides.

  “It’s still soaking,” he said. “And discolored. He washed her, used a lot of water. There was probably a lot of blood this time. Looking at the wounds, the navel, the nipples, even the eyelids…I think all of these will prove to be antemortem. The breasts are like the head, tremendous vascular density. You cut the head or breasts, and you’re going to shed a lot of blood.” Grant nodded to himself. “He came into his own with this one. He went all the way. Full-blown sexual sadism. She felt everything.”

  Palma thought his voice was different somehow, perhaps a little more hushed, more grave.

  He stood looking at Vickie, craned his neck forward, and then bent again and brought his face right down to her vulva. Then without saying anythin
g he straightened up again, looked around the room. He went to the closet and got an empty wire coat hanger and returned to the bed, straightening the hooked end of it with his hands. Again he bent over the body and with the straightened wire he very carefully, like a surgeon, reached down between her crotch, fished a moment in her hair, and pulled up the end of a thin white string protruding from her vagina. He laid it on the small pad of hair. “Menstruating,” he said.

  He stood back again and shook his head, his eyes still on the body, his jaw muscles working down toward his mustache.

  “This isn’t all that much mutilation,” he said. “I’ve seen this small amount before…on single sexual homicides. Usually it’s more, a lot more, especially if it’s a serial killer. It tends to get worse with every victim, complete evisceration, body parts strewn all over the place.” He shook his head, looking at Kittrie. “But this small amount of mutilation—eyelids, nipples—in a serial killer is unexpected. Bite marks, suck marks, even this many, okay. The facial beating, okay. But this small amount of mutilation…and the parts he chose to mutilate…I don’t know. This just isn’t tracking in a way you’d expect. It’s just not a pattern I’ve seen before, in its relative moderation, in its selectivity. They usually want to get inside them, take them apart, look at every little thing. This guy, he’s not showing the kind of curiosity in the female sexual body parts we usually see.”

  Palma looked at Grant. His head was tilted slightly as he looked at Vickie on the bed, the coat hanger dangling from his left hand, his right hand thrust back into his pocket, his double-breasted coat still buttoned. Still, she could see that his shirt was terribly wrinkled as if he had slept in it, and it would be clear to anyone that his suit was working on its second day of wrinkles. His posture reflected his consternation, and the dim light of the bedroom accented the shadow of his beard.