Mercy

by David L Lindsey

  Practiced at dodging the media in sensational cases, Sander Grant had worked round the clock in the seclusion of the homicide division to complete his report and then, within forty-eight hours, was on a plane back to Quantico.

  But Carmen Palma was not so fortunate. From the time the murders first came to light she had been identified as the central detective in the investigation, and the fact that she was a woman homicide detective had intrigued the media from the beginning. For weeks after the story broke she was besieged by reporters from newspapers large and small, by writers from magazines on both sides of the Atlantic, by newsmen from the networks and talk-show bookers, by personality agents and movie producers waving contracts and talking stars and package deals, and by aspiring bestselling authors promising percentages and household recognition.

  Palma refused them all. The scene she had blundered onto at Broussard’s home that hot June night had embedded itself in her mind, and for months afterward it was seldom out of her thoughts. The women, both living and deceased, she had gotten to know during the investigation, the issues she had confronted, the new coils of psychology she had discovered both in the killer and in herself, all had worked together to disturb her peace of mind and prevent her from going back to her life as it was, even without the turmoil produced by the media’s insatiable appetite. For a while her days were filled wrapping up loose ends and helping the DA’s office prepare its case. And, of course, there were her other cases as well. Her world had not begun and would not end with the bizarre career of Mary Lowe.

  Paul Lowe’s money had gotten the best defense team it could buy, and the court was immediately swamped with motions and continuances and every manner of delay imaginable. The legal procession to Mary Lowe’s trial promised to be convoluted and protracted.

  Through the DA’s office, Palma was kept informed of the slowly developing posture that Mary’s lawyers were planning to make in her defense. She would readily admit to having an affair with Dr. Dominick Broussard, but in this, they would insist, she was more victim than accomplice. She had put her trust in him, and he had taken advantage of her by exploiting the very thing for which she had gone to him in search of remedy. Broussard’s records were seized, and it was discovered that with the astonishing poor judgment one sometimes sees in the private affairs of men known publicly to be perspicacious, he had kept a ‘secret’ record of all the affairs he had had with his patients over the years. There was ample evidence to support Mary’s claims that Broussard had abused his professional relationship with her.

  As to how she had come to be naked in bed with the dead Broussard, her explanation was straightforward and simple. At Broussard’s request, she had agreed to meet him at his home, where he proceeded to drug and assault her. The next thing she knew the police were bursting through Broussard’s bedroom door. When the police entered Broussard’s house that night, they were in effect “rescuing” Mary from a long, vicious enslavement to the insidious Dr. Broussard. Regardless of whoever else Broussard had lured to his bedroom that night, Mary herself was lucky to have gotten out with her life. Broussard’s own housekeeper could testify to the fact that the doctor regularly enticed women to his home, where he apparently forced them to participate in his sordid sexual rituals, just as he had Mary Lowe.

  The unidentified pubic hairs and the few strands of head hair that came from Sandra Moser, Dorothy Samenov, and Vickie Kittrie matched Mary Lowe’s. Her lawyers nodded. They admitted up front that Mary was having affairs with women. Once again, her inexplicable bisexual tendencies were something she was seeking Broussard’s help in “correcting,” instead his sexual abuse had only served to exacerbate them. It may have been unfortunate coincidence that she had had sexual relations with each of the victims before they were killed—they were, after all, a rather small and closely knit group—but certainly it was nothing more than that. Because of the regular sexual intimacy among them, the evidentiary strength of finding Mary’s hair on the victims was greatly weakened.

  Mirel Fair’s testimony regarding Mary’s sadomasochist play at her “dungeon” would be weakened by Farr’s own tarnished reputation and by the fact that she was testifying for the DA’s office, which had offered her a “deal” in exchange for not being indicted as an accomplice for hiding Clyde Barbish in the Louise Ackley and Lalo Montalvo killings. By now, Barbish had recovered enough to understand the full import of what was about to happen to him, and he plea-bargained for a lesser charge in exchange for testifying that Reynolds had hired him to kill Louise Ackley who, having learned one more form of deviant behavior from her brother, was threatening to blackmail him.

  It was true that there were those who could testify that Mary often went to Mirel Farr’s to participate in sadomasochist scenarios, but these were only prime examples of how thoroughly she had succumbed to Broussard’s spell. Didn’t he go there to watch her in these acts? There was apparently no limit to the extent to which he was willing to corrupt his clients in order to satisfy his own deviant pleasures.

  But the coup de grace to the state’s case against Mary Lowe, the defense would argue, was provided by the investigative expertise brought to bear by the state itself. Federal Bureau of Investigation Special Agent Sander Grant, a veteran member of the Behavioral Science Unit of the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime, FBI Academy, Quantico, Virginia, would be subpoenaed to testify that in all his years of experience with violent crime, after analyzing thousands of cases of murder, including serial killers, he had never seen a case in which a woman had been the perpetrator of a sexually motivated homicide of this kind. Never.

  The state, of course, would have their counterarguments, their own witnesses and manner of presenting the evidence and arguing the case, but the fact remained that the case against Mary Lowe, “victim,” was far from being a cinch for successful prosecution. It was unlikely that they could get convictions on the deaths of Moser, Samenov, Mello, and Kittrie. The evidence was prominently circumstantial. And even in Broussard’s case they would have to conduct a careful and intelligent voir dire and then sweat blood to bring it off. And if it appeared to the defense that the jury was actually going to be convinced by the paltry show of evidence presented by the state, they simply would switch their defense to temporary insanity, which, in light of the bizarre setting in which Mary had been found at Broussard’s that night, certainly would seem to be a credible defense. As Broussard’s victim, Mary simply had been pushed too far, to the very limit of her sanity, and temporarily had lost control of her senses and killed him. And who could blame her? Wasn’t this even, in the true sense of the meaning, self-defense?

  The fact was, in not being sure who they were pursuing, in not having a solid suspect, in being kept off balance by the contradictory evidence, and by being caught off guard when the last killing, that of Dr. Broussard, had presented them with an unavoidable suspect, the police had not been able to build a solid case as the investigation progressed. The defense could, and would, challenge them at every turn, point for point, leaving the jury to decide if this much-abused mother of two could possibly have committed the heinous sexually motivated killings of which she had been accused, the kind of killings that, by the FBI’s own historical records of criminology, had never before been committed by a woman.

  While the two sides laboriously prepared their legal arsenals for a trial that was still many months away, Palma kept to her business, locked into a routine of steady work that she had sought in an effort to keep her head clear of the craziness. She had had to change her telephone number twice and had developed a reputation among the writers and movie people still pursuing her of being an eccentric (for turning down the publicity and inevitable fame), of being a fool (for turning down the money), of being a bitch (for hanging up on them, ignoring their letters and telegrams, refusing to answer her door), and of being a class act (for sticking to her guns). But Palma had no noble feelings for avoiding all that had been coming her way, whether it might have proved to be good or b
ad.

  The truth was, after what she had been through, Palma had discovered that she could not shake a feeling of restlessness, maybe even of vague apprehensions. Peace of mind was no longer possible. It could not be conjured up by going over and over the crime scenes or thinking through the interviews for the hundredth time or second-guessing for the hundredth time the way she had handled her investigation. It could not be acquired through long weekends of solitude in which she dwelt upon the surprises she should have anticipated in the case, or in the people she had met, or even in herself. It could not be summoned from the jugs of her Italian table wine or in the last of the fancy green bottles of Tanqueray gin that Brian had left behind. To Palma’s increasing consternation, the world had changed. Or she had changed. Nothing was the same, no smell or sight or sound or emotion was as it had been, nothing satisfied. It was true that she had discovered something within her that she had never known was there, and that she was wary of it, perhaps even fearful. But her uneasiness was more than that. Something was missing, and a sense of emptiness pervaded every moment.

  Then, near the end of August, when a fierce heat had settled over the bayous and stands of loblolly pines, and a perverse, subtropical doldrum had appeared overnight from the Gulf of Mexico to keep down the coastal breezes that normally could have relieved the blistering city, Palma spent a Sunday afternoon alone at her mother’s, who was visiting her other daughter in Victoria. Palma had fled the loneliness of her own house in West University Place and had come home, where even the empty rooms were not empty because of the memories, where everything perceived by her five senses was familiar, and nothing changed. Here everything had been settled. There were no surprises to disturb the past or taint the future.

  She had gone to her old bedroom and peeled off her underwear and slipped on a loose-fitting sun dress, left her shoes in the middle of the floor and walked barefooted and idly through the house, looking at each of the empty rooms as if she were visiting an old friend who reminded her that at one time things had indeed been simpler. When she came into the kitchen she took two limes out of the hanging basket where her mother kept them near the windows next to the back door. She got ice from the refrigerator and put it into a glass and squeezed both limes over the ice and added water from the faucet at the sink. Stirring it with her finger, she took the drink out the screen door to the courtyard, where the cicadas droned so fiercely that they completely drowned out the noises of the city. She might have been in the middle of a jungle.

  With a water hose she sprayed the stone walks and the plantains and hibiscus that grew along the borders until the courtyard smelled of damp earth. Then she sprayed her feet and legs, and bent down and ran the stream across her face. Without bothering to wipe off the water, she turned off the hydrant and with a dripping face walked back to the swing. She sat in it sideways, stretching out her legs on the slatted seat and leaned back against the arm and the chain. With a slight bow forward she set the swing going, the long chains groaning softly on the leather guides wrapped around the mammoth limb of the water oak. She sipped the cold lime-flavored water and reached back and gathered her long hair and held it in a pile on top of her head.

  She lost track of time, which was what she had wanted to do most of all. In the last month it had been a surprisingly difficult thing to achieve. Everything she did, everything she thought, reminded her of some aspect, recent or remote, disquieting or numbing, about Mary Lowe and the women who had died.

  She had drunk all the lime water and had started eating the ice when she thought she heard a car stop in front of the house. The garden wall blocked the street except for the deep green canopies of the Mexican plums, but she listened to the car door open and shut. There was a brief silence until the footsteps hit the stones of the front walk, and then she listened to their progress toward the front of the house, then stop before they reached the porch. They paused, and then by some instinct or deduction, they changed direction and took the walk that led around to the garden gate.

  Palma waited, eating ice, looking at the wrought-iron gate where the person would appear between the two scarlet-bloomed hibiscus that flanked either side of the gate. Sander Grant stepped into the frame of flowers and wrought-iron and looked through the bars into the courtyard. He saw her immediately, sitting with her feet propped up in the swing.

  “My God,” she said.

  “Hello.” He pushed open the gate. He was wearing suit pants and a white shirt without a coat. His tie and collar were loosened and his sleeves were rolled to the elbow. He closed the gate behind him and approached her at the same pace he had walked up the front sidewalk. Speechless, Palma watched him come through the dappled shade and plantains, his broken nose as welcome a sight as she could ever have hoped to see. She had the presence of mind to lower her legs before he was close enough to see her bottom.

  He smiled at her as he approached. “Surprise, huh?”

  She steadied herself and swung her feet onto the stones to stand.

  “They told me downtown you might be at your mother’s if you weren’t home,” he said, stopping a few feet from where she stood with the backs of her legs against the front of the swing. The cicadas roared in her ears. “I hope it’s all right,” he said.

  “Of course.” She didn’t know whether to reach out and shake his hand or embrace him. Grant put his hands in his pockets and smiled again, as if he knew how she felt.

  Her eyes couldn’t get enough of him. She gestured with her glass. “What are you doing here?”

  “You have any more of whatever that is?” he said, lifting his chin at her glass.

  “Oh, God, sure. I’m sorry. Here,” she said. “Sit down.” She stepped away from the swing and then thought of how she must look. She thought of her bra and panties tossed on the bed in her old room. She laughed self-consciously. “I can’t believe you just showed up like this.”

  Grant nodded with a shrug and sat down in the swing, looking up at her. Suddenly she felt naked. The sun dress had not been designed to be worn without underwear.

  “I’ll get us another drink,” she said. “It’s only lime and water. It’ll take just a second.” And she turned and walked into the house and went straight to her bedroom.

  “I’ve never written such a lengthy and detailed report,” Grant said. “I worked on it for several weeks, incorporating graphics and photographs, technical reports from the autopsies and crime lab. Everything I could get my hands on has gone into it. It was hell to organize. But it’s a landmark case as far as we’re concerned.” The two of them were sitting in the swing. He had been doing most of the talking, stopping every once in a while to sip the lime and water and touch the sweaty glass to the side of his face. “I must’ve presented the case half a dozen times already, to the other agents in the unit, to the cadets, to the officers in the Fellowship program, to anyone who’d sit still long enough.”

  Palma had been listening, turning her head away once in a while to look across the mottled shadows of the courtyard, dropping her eyes to her glass, afraid that she was looking at him too much.

  He sipped from his glass again and dabbed at his mustache with the light green paper napkin she had brought out with his glass.

  “Rankin, her attorney’s, already gotten in touch with you?” Palma asked, moving a bare foot over the stones under the swing.

  “Yeah,” Grant nodded. “Hell of a twist, isn’t it? Makes the whole thing even worse.” He wasn’t uneasy about looking at her. He had hardly taken his eyes off her.

  “It’s months before this thing goes to trial,” she said. “A lot can happen in that time. Maybe it won’t come to that.”

  Grant snorted and looked away toward the gate where he had come in. She raised her eyes from her glass, studied his broken nose, his British soldier’s profile, the brindled gray at his temples, the thickness of his chest.

  He turned back and caught her looking at him.

  “What I’d like,” he said, “is for you to consider coming to Qu
antico for a while. We’ll have a new Fellowship program starting in the fall, actually next month, September. I’ve recommended you for one of the positions.”

  Palma was surprised. She hadn’t seen it coming. He saw her hesitating.

  “The new course begins in about three weeks. You don’t have that much time to think about it.” He looked at his glass and rattled the ice. “It’s a year-long course. You’ll be there a year.”

  “I’m not sure I can do that,” she said.

  “I’ve taken the liberty of checking this out with Captain McComb,” Grant added cautiously. “They know how I feel about your abilities. Only a select few get into the Fellowship program. If you accept, they’ll give you the necessary leave of absence, with pay.”

  Palma was taken aback. “I…I’m surprised,” she said. “I’m flattered, I guess, that they’d do that.” She paused. “But that’s not what I meant. It’s the course. I’m not sure I can…handle that. That’s primarily what I’d be doing, isn’t it? When I finish the course? I’d be profiling?”

  “Right. Violent crime analysis. You’d be obligated to dedicate at least the next three years to practicing what the Bureau has trained you to do.”

  She looked away again, shaking her head, uncertain.