Mercy (36 page)

Palma moved around the bed slowly, inspecting the woman from several angles. She noted that the toenails were painted. She bent down and smelled them. The polish was fresh; the killer had probably done it himself after he laid her out. She walked around to the right side of the bed and bent down again to smell the woman’s fingernails. Also fresh. And there was something else. She smelled the hands again, then moved lower and smelled her waist. Bath oil. She moved around the body smelling different areas, all of which gave off the fragrance of bath oil. But it was obvious the killer had not bathed her after she died. Had she bathed just prior to this encounter, or had the killer given her a “dry bath,” wiping her down with bath oil afterward? Palma made a mental note to check the washcloths in the bathroom and to see if the victim had this particular fragrance of bath oil among her toilet articles.

The ligature marks around her neck and wrists and ankles were the same as the others. And the bite marks. But this time the biting had been savage. The killer’s teeth had ripped and torn the flesh, and chunks were bitten out in three places: the left breast, the inner left thigh, and the right vulva, where more than an inch of the labia majora had been bitten away with its hair. Palma was able to make note of this last bite without touching the body only because of a slight change in pattern in this victim’s positioning: her legs had not been closed together tightly. Palma studied this minor variation for a long time, her concern with the state of the body having grown to such an extent as to be obsessive. She had begun to believe that nothing in these homicides, no matter how minute, was incidental. Could it be that the importance the killer placed on a particular detail had an inverse relationship to its size so that the smaller the point of attention, the greater its significance? But this subtle separation of the legs truly did seem incidental, except that it attracted notice to the bite taken from the labia majora.

And then there was the strange treatment of the navel. Palma bent closer to the woman’s stomach and examined the wound. Again the upper and lower teeth had been placed precisely around the navel in two different positions to form a complete closed circle. Within that circle the tissue was turning black from the blood that had been sucked to the surface of the skin with such force that the killer had almost extracted blood through the epidermis itself. What was the fascination this man had for his victim’s navels? Not only did he consistently abuse them, but he did so with a precision that indicated a ritual significance. Although the other bites seemed almost random—aside from the fact that they were primarily directed at parts of the body that had sexual connotations—the preoccupation with a precise kind of abuse of the navel was quickly becoming a point of focus for Palma, as it was for the killer.

Straightening up, she moved back from the bed and walked around it, from one side to the other several times, being careful to stay far enough back so that she would not mash into the carpet any hairs that might have fallen during the killer’s ministrations. The red satin sheet provided an unusual foil for the victim’s positioning and allowed Palma to see something she had not noticed with the other two victims. She made another mental note to check the crime scene photographs of Moser and Samenov. She returned to the left side of the bed, gathering her skirt close around her, holding it in her lap as she bent down once again. The sheet was not completely smooth around all sides of the body, but was puckered along the length of the woman’s left side, with a significant bunching of the satin adjacent to her hips. Palma studied the angle of the furrows. Jesus.

He had lain down with her.

And what had he done?

He had tied her up and tortured her; he had mutilated and tormented her while she was still alive; he had strangled her to death; and then he had cleaned her up and carefully, taking great pains, meticulously had applied makeup in a specific manner. What in the hell had he done then? They would find no semen. They would find no discharge other than vaginal fluids she might have smeared on the sheets during their sexual foreplay before the killer had gotten down to business. So what in God’s name had he done at this point? Why did he lie down with her?

Palma swallowed. What was it that Claire had said? Even at the time Palma had thought the remark provoked an eerie imagery. Psychosexually, she had said from the shadows, Gil Reynolds was a cretin.

She heard voices coming down the wide corridor outside and recognized Birley and Frisch. They stopped speaking when they entered the sitting room and both were quiet when they walked through the bedroom door. They both looked at Palma, but neither spoke as their eyes settled on the woman on the bed. Frisch stopped a few feet away from the bed, but Birley continued up to the edge, where he stood silently, his experienced eyes ticking off the similarities of the wounds. He shook his head. Palma looked at Frisch, whose long face wore the drawn expression of a lieutenant who knew he was waist-deep in trouble.

“I want to get Sander Grant down here,” Palma said. “No one here has ever seen anything like this. This is dark water, Karl.”

Frisch, moving stiffly, approached the bed. “Goddammit,” he said.

“She’s right,” Birley said. He grimaced. “Shit, just look at this.”

“Goddammit.” Frisch’s thin shoulders sat at an odd angle, one hand holding a handset emitting short bursts of static.

“I’m going to call him,” Palma said, and walked out into the sitting room where a telephone rested on a gilt-trimmed French secretary. Corbeil was standing in the doorway of the bedroom and a few more people were inching through the hall door into the sitting room. LeBrun still hadn’t arrived.

Palma dialed Grant’s number, which she had memorized. She looked at Corbeil and then at the cluster of people. “I’m going to have to have some privacy,” she said. Corbeil started getting them out and shouted out to someone to get everybody the hell downstairs and put crime scene ribbon at the bottom of the stairs with a couple of officers.

Palma heard the phone ringing at the other end and then, remembering, she turned to Corbeil.

“What’s her name?”

“Her name? Oh, Mello…Bernadine.”

“Hello,” Grant said.

PART TWO

FIFTH DAY

31

Friday, June 2

“O
h, let’s see,” Clay Garrett mused, squinting a little at the rain pelting through the low beam of his headlights as he turned off the Sam Houston Parkway onto John F. Kennedy Boulevard that approached the Houston Intercontinental Airport from its south side. Oncoming cars on the other side of the esplanade threw splashes of light over his hook-nosed profile, mottled with shadows from the raindrops on the windshield. “Sander’s kind of a serious sort of fella. I used to work in the same field office with him a long time ago, before he was in this BSU business. Like most of us, he doesn’t seem to have changed any, just gets deeper into how he is.” Garrett smiled at that.

Palma waited, looking through the windshield at the rain drifting across the broad, lighted corridor that had been cut through the dense pines. They began to pass under the green signs suspended high over the boulevard that told you what airlines were in what terminals. To their left, across the esplanade and the oncoming traffic, were the air cargo terminals: Aramco, Conoco, Tenneco, Shell, Exxon…

“He’s…polite. A gentleman, sort of, but not all that easy to get to know.”

The Intercontinental Airport was on the north side of the city, half an hour’s drive out in good traffic. They were almost there and Palma had just now gotten around to asking the question after a lull in conversation. She had been awake only half an hour when Garrett picked her up at her home in University Place. The day had been long and hectic, and she felt the mild disorientation she always experienced when she went to sleep in the late afternoon and woke just as it was getting dark. After staying at the scene of Bernadine Mello’s death until Julie LeBrun had finished and taken his findings to the crime lab, and the body had gone to the morgue, Palma had spent the rest of the morning going through Mello’s personal effects with Birley.

This latest death had changed the face of the investigation, as everyone knew it would when it finally happened. The media were all over the story within hours, and no matter how tight a homicide division runs its shop, the big picture cannot be kept under wraps indefinitely. Bernadine Mello’s death took the covers off. The media didn’t know much, but they soon connected the deaths of the three West Houston women who had died in the last few weeks. The headline articles in the late-morning editions of the papers and the lead story on the noon radio and television news didn’t hesitate to use the terms “psychopath” and “serial killer.” The stories were short, but the reporters smelled fresh meat, and they were swarming.

Karl Frisch was quick to set operational parameters and establish a system of procedures for a task force. Don Leeland’s past experience in crime analysis landed him the desk job of case review coordinator. Assisted by another detective, he would function as the central clearing point for all the new information that would come in about the four cases (Ackley and Montoya were considered as a single case) from the task force’s investigative teams. He would review and analyze their reports and supplements regarding suspects, victims, witnesses, and physical evidence, looking for new relationships between leads, create files on each witness and suspect (including photographs), create charts and diagrams of the progress of each case, monitoring changes in suspect status, and coordinating follow-up interviews to prevent duplicate contacts or omissions.

Jules LeBrun was put in charge of evidence control and storage and would act as liaison with Barbara Soronno in the crime lab. If there were any screwups regarding evidence, the buck stopped with LeBrun.

Cushing got a new partner and was to continue concentrating on the list of men found in Dorothy Samenov’s address book and pursuing any leads that came from those interviews. Palma and Birley’s assignments took them in opposite directions. Birley now had to check out Bernadine Mello’s physicians as he had done with Moser and Samenov, as well as having the immediate task of familiarizing Manny Childs and Joe Garro with the earlier cases so they could pick up Bernadine Mello.

Frisch himself would be responsible for communicating with the media, working with Leeland to determine what non-sensitive material could be released in careful information bites to satisfy the journalists. The captain would take the heat from the politicos and the police administration. Nobody was looking forward to it.

Palma had to go back to Saulnier to try to get as many names of women in the society as Saulnier could be persuaded to cough up, including Claire’s, and she had to try to establish whether Bernadine Mello was also a member of the group. But by the time all that was hashed out it was one o’clock in the afternoon and she was headed home for a few hours’ sleep. It seemed she had hardly gotten her clothes off before Garrett was calling to tell her he was on his way, and by four o’clock they were on the darkening, rainy streets headed to the airport to pick up Grant and Robert Hauser, the other agent coming with him.

“But Sander’s had a run of hard luck.” Garrett bent forward to read a sign passing overhead. “He’s got twin daughters. Few years ago…uh, it’s been three, I guess, a little over, his wife died of cancer. It was one of those things where she went in for a checkup and they discovered it and in ninety days she was gone. It was about four months before the girls were to go off to college. They decided they’d sit it out a year, a semester at least, but Sander made them go on. He knew it’d be easier on them to get into something new, not mope around the place with him. They went on. But it was hell on Sander. Had a house full of women, then six months later nobody but him.”

They drove under a runway just as a lumbering airliner was passing across, its engines screaming with a loud, sucking whine, and then Garrett steered the car into the coils of ramps that brought them to the parking garage outside Terminal B. He took a ticket at a gate, and then parked directly across from the terminal doors. He cut off the motor, but didn’t move to get out of the car.

“He got depressed,” Garrett continued, pulling the key out of the ignition and draping his wrists over the steering wheel. “Twins were in school up in New York—Columbia—so they couldn’t come home that much. Sander got to where he couldn’t stand the house. They lived somewhere around Fredericksburg, big old home, because it was close to Quantico. Twins grew up there mostly. But he couldn’t take it. Sold the place, pulled up all his roots, and moved into Washington. That’s a pretty good commute down Interstate 95 to Quantico every day.”

Garrett thought a moment, started tapping the key on the steering column, thinking. “I don’t know what happened, exactly, but there was something about him getting involved with a Chinese woman…some kind of diplomat’s wife. He married her. I think she was…totally out of character for Grant. She was a real knockout, and he just went nuts over her. And then it all blew to hell.”

Garrett shook his head. “I don’t know. Rumors. Hell, Sander never confided in people, that’s his problem. That’s what Marne was, his confidante. When she died…screwed up his psychological equilibrium. Guy like that, what he does for a living. It’s like being a pathologist; dead people from breakfast to supper. Except with Sander and his boys it’s the psychological stuff too, not just the bodies. With a pathologist he can just walk away from it, leave it at the morgue. These guys with Sander, they carry it around in their heads.”

Garrett looked at Palma. “But I understand he got through it all right. Chinese lady an’ all.”

“How long has that been?” Palma asked.

Garrett shook his head. “I don’t know, exactly,” he said, reaching for the door handle.

They made their way along the crowded concourse, past the security checks that took them into the gates.

“There’s Hauser,” Garrett said, looking at his watch. “They’re early.”

They approached a good-looking young man with thick, closely barbered blond hair who was standing by a small pile of luggage at the edge of the gate’s waiting area, eating a Butter-finger. He recognized Garrett across the flow of pedestrian traffic in the concourse, took the last bite of the candy bar, and wadded up the wrapper, tossing it into the trash. By the time they got to him he was swallowing and grinning, putting out his hand.