Mercy (4 page)

When Cushing came to homicide, Palma had to deal with his ego within the first three days, which is how long it took this cocky new guy to ask her out for a drink. She accepted, giving him the benefit of the doubt. He took her to an expensive club where they sat at the crowded bar. Two drinks down, Cushing had one hand on her upper thigh and still traveling, as he ran his finest line on her, a stale monologue that would have been transparent even to a convent novitiate. Keeping her eyes on his, she had unobtrusively dropped her free hand down between Cushing’s legs and latched on to the tender, knobbed end of his penis as if her hand had been guided by radar. She gripped it in a clinch that launched his eyebrows to his hairline and widened his eyes. Without saying a word or changing her expression, she squeezed him so fiercely she had momentary fears of inflicting permanent damage. But she didn’t let go of her eye-watering grip on his glans until he moved his hand from her thigh. Neither of them spoke as they looked at each other, disconnected. Momentarily disarmed and then suddenly furious, and probably in considerable pain, Cushing wheeled around and walked out of the bar, leaving Palma to pay for the drinks and take a cab back to the station to pick up her car.

Cushing never mentioned the incident, never, and neither did she. And he never forgave her. Even now, after three years, Art Cushing could hardly be civil to her. Their mutual antagonism was well known to everyone in the division and was always a good subject for idle gossip, though the speculation about what had happened between them was always more lurid than the facts. No one ever knew the source of their shared animosity. Cushing’s machismo would never allow him to relate the story to anyone, under any circumstances, and Palma had long since lost interest in both the incident and Cushing’s damaged ego. She thought he at least ought to be grateful to her for that.

“I can’t wait to see this,” Palma said.

“Yeah,” Birley grinned and moved into the far right lane for the Westheimer exit half a mile ahead. The traffic grew heavier now and slowed, and to their right the sun was climbing near the meridian, shriveling the Gulf clouds as it rose.

The Hammersmith condominium complex was in a district with the cloying name of Charmwood on the southern bank of Buffalo Bayou and only blocks away from the villages of Bunker Hill, Piney Point, and Hunters Creek. Just off South Voss near Westheimer, the complex was a mingle of small wooded lanes where the buildings were joined together like row houses, different styles and colors butting up against each other in an imperfect harmony, their various rooflines and chimneys bouncing up and down like the individual notes on a musical score. They had been around a while, maybe since the sixties, which in this city of the Modern Way gave them an established air and lent them a kind of comfortable intimacy that in another time and place would have been called a neighborhood.

To the east a little way were the trendy, uptown Post Oak and Galleria shopping districts which were once again exhibiting a grandeur and international popularity that everyone had thought had been irreparably damaged by the oil and real estate disasters of the mid-eighties. But as the new decade came onstage, so did a new city, or at least a city that was beginning to realize the end of its travail was in sight. Houston was making a comeback, and it wasn’t apologizing for the lost time. The nouveau riche had evaporated like bayou mist in the harsh sunlight of hard times, leaving the old money behind to take the heat. And they had done it. The hangers-on, who came from nowhere in particular and leeched onto good times wherever they happened to be, were gone. The city had returned to its sanity which, combined with the kind of hard-won experience that comes with the jolting reversal of fortunes, had achieved something approaching wisdom. The worst was over. And if the survivors had anything to do with the future, and they intended to, it would never again be as foolishly sublime, or as gallingly bad, as it had been.

The moment they turned into Olympia Street, Palma saw the police cars and the white crime scene unit at the end of the lane. And she saw, at next glance, the inevitable curious. But they weren’t crowding around the police cars or pressing up to the yellow crime scene tape that circumscribed the parameter of violence; they were not aggressive in their inquisitiveness, not pushing to get closer as did their less sophisticated counterparts in whose frayed neighborhoods these sorts of scenes were usually played out. No, these curious were sober and physically remote. Unused to the intrusive sequelae of illegal death, they sensed the inappropriateness of it and wanted nothing to do with it. They hung back, demonstrating their censure by their aloofness. Violent death was a shabby affair. They didn’t approve.

When Palma got out of the car, which Birley parked at the curb behind Cushing and Leeland’s, the gummy morning heat enveloped her like the tropical, early-day heat of the Yucatan. But instead of the fragrance of bougainvilleas and frangipani, Palma smelled the sweet, weighty breath of honeysuckle and magnolia and jasmine, and heard the spit-spit-spit-spit of a water sprinkler in between the scratchy transmissions of a patrol unit radio.

She was on the sidewalk before Birley, who always took his time, had even gotten out of his seat belt. With her shield hanging from the side pocket of her purse, she hurried past the two young patrolmen manning the yellow-ribboned courtyard and approached the front door, shiny with heavy coats of wine red enamel. Palma noticed that the brass knocker in the center was already dusted with magnetic ferric oxide. The doorknob wouldn’t matter. She pushed open the door and was confronted with a heavy wash of cold air. The place was freezing.

Two other patrolmen were standing in the living room talking to Wendell Barry, the storklike coroner’s investigator, and Palma spoke to them as she glanced around the light and airy living room with its vaulted ceiling reaching to the second floor. Without hesitating, she passed into a wide corridor and started toward an opened doorway from which she heard the steady, solitary voice of the CSU investigator, Jules LeBrun.

She approached the door, stepped inside the bedroom, and stopped. Art Cushing and his partner Don Leeland, a quiet, thickset man in his late thirties, stood with their backs to her, blocking her view of most of the bed. She could see only the dead woman’s feet and her head from the neck up, her eyes open. Both men had their hands in their pockets looking at the woman while LeBrun moved around the bed with an audio-video camera, narrating the setting of the body, pointing the camera at the naked woman on the bed as if she were the catatonic starlet of a porno film. The place was as cold as a meat locker. Palma recognized the faint fragrance of cosmetics that hovers in women’s bedrooms.

Almost simultaneously Cushing and Leeland turned around and saw her. Cushing turned back to the bed, but Lee-land smiled faintly at her from under his thick, brindled mustache and raised his chin at her. No one spoke or moved for a couple of minutes until LeBrun finished recording his narration and went to another room.

“Hey, Carmen,” Cushing said, turning back to her again, reflexively wiping the corners of his mouth with his thumb and forefinger. He never said hi or hello or whattya say or how’s it goin’, he said hey. He was wearing a baggy gray suit and black shirt with a dove gray tie. Nodding toward the bed as both men moved apart to make room for her, he said, “Take a look.”

Palma could feel their eyes on her as she approached, and the instant she glimpsed the body she knew why, even before she had gotten close enough to examine it. She knew because of instinct, that indisputable feminine exertion that tugged at her pelvis and pulled at the sides of her eyes. It took all of her self-control not to react, not to let them know she had seen this before, and that it scared her.

The woman was nude, waxy pale, and only slightly gaseous as she lay in the middle of the bed from which all the covers had been stripped except the bottom sheet. A pillow had been placed under her head, and she had been positioned in a. funereal posture, straight out, legs together, her hands placed one on top of the other just below her lolling breasts. Slightly discolored furrows encircled her wrists where ligatures had been, and encircling her neck was a single, broader furrow punctuated with small reddish welts where the belt holes had been. Her eyes were open. Her blond hair seemed to have been freshly combed, and her battered and bloated face was freshly made up, the cosmetics expertly applied: eye shadow, eye liner, powder, and glistening lip gloss. Her lower abdomen was only now showing the first faint, blue-green discoloration of internal bacterial decomposition. There were a few bruises, seemingly random, scattered over her body and a widespread stippling of bite marks on her breasts and thighs. Palma knew when they spread her legs they would find others on the insides of her thighs and around her vulva. Both nipples were missing, excised with neat, surgical precision, and the quarter-size wounds had turned black from exposure.

Palma knew what she was looking at, but held her tongue, her thoughts shooting way out on a thin string of probabilities.

“And…” Cushing said, stepping back carefully to show her a chair not far from the bed. A woman’s clothes were there, fastidiously folded, laid out as if they had been prepared to be packed in a suitcase. Palma looked at Cushing. He was chewing gum, hard, his smoothly shaven jaw muscles rippling in front of his ears. “It’s the same shit, isn’t it? What you and Birley came onto a coupla weeks ago.” It was bubble gum; she could smell it on his breath. He was almost smiling, confident, pleased with himself.

Palma turned around, looking for something else. She found the bundle of bedclothes piled next to an opened closet door. She had to give Cushing credit. He must have heard talk around the squad room, and the details stuck with him. They had been out of the ordinary.

“Who is she?” she asked.

“Dorothy Ann Samenov, a sales representative for Computron. Computer software. Offices downtown, Allied Bank Plaza. Thirty-eight years old, according to her driver’s license.”

She turned around to face him.

“Patrolman outside the door, VanMeter, found her,” Cushing said, managing to talk and chew his gum at the same time. “Came here with the victim’s friend…Vickie Kittrie. She works with Samenov. Last Thursday Samenov and Kittrie and others from their office went out for drinks after work. Victim left the bar about 6:30
P.M.
That was the last time anyone saw her alive, far as we know. Next morning she didn’t show for work. Kittrie called her at home, but there was no answer, and they assumed she was sick. Kittrie called throughout the day, but never got an answer. After work she went by to check. Samenov’s car was parked in front out there, just like it is now.”

“Kittrie doesn’t live here?”

“Nope. Kittrie knocks on the door,” Cushing continued. “No answer. She wonders about this, but goes on. Next morning, Saturday, they’re supposed to have an exercise class together. When Samenov doesn’t show up Kittrie comes by again, still no answer. Car’s still out front. She gets worried, calls the police. She tells the patrolman her story, but he doesn’t want to enter the place with no evidence of foul play. He asks all the usual questions and suggests maybe that Samenov skipped for a long weekend with somebody. Kittrie admitted Samenov sometimes went out of town for the weekend, but she usually told someone where she was going. Officer suggests Kittrie should try to get in touch with Samenov again on Sunday, and if Samenov does not show up for work on Monday, then call the police again. That’s what she did.”

“Have you talked to her?” Palma asked.

“Nope.” Cushing started jangling the change in his pocket. “What do you think? Same boy, huh?”

“I don’t know,” she lied. She knew damn well it was, and it made her queasy. Everything about it signaled brainsick. She turned around. “John?”

Birley was standing behind them, just inside the door, already looking at the dead woman, nonplussed.

“Hey, Birley,” Cushing said.

Birley moseyed into the room. “Whatcha got?” he said to Leeland, good-naturedly gripping the top of Leeland’s thick shoulder as he went past him, never taking his eyes off the bed. Leeland gave him an amused grin, but didn’t say anything.

“Have you guys started in here?” Palma asked.

“Shit! Carmen, it’s virgin,” Cushing said, curling his top lip. “Nobody’s been in here but that patrolman, Julie in there, and us. Only thing we’ve touched is the carpet under our shoes, and not very damn much of that.” Palma was a stickler. Cushing knew exactly what she was thinking: Had they touched anything, opened a drawer, swung a door one way or the other, touched the corpse?

Birley stood beside Palma at the bed, both of them staring at the woman in silence.

“Son of a bitch,” he said. He knew, too.

“Can you believe it?” Palma was fighting a jittery feeling.

“I guess I’d better.” Birley shrugged against the cold.

“What the hell are you two talkin’ about?” Cushing tossed his head. “Is this the same guy’s work or what, goddammit?”

“It could be,” Palma said without looking at him.

“Well, very goddamn good,” Cushing snorted. “Thank you.”

“Some advice, Cush,” Birley said calmly. “If you don’t come up with any more evidence here than we did with the other one, you’re going to be in trouble. This guy’s going to start doing these as regular as clockwork. He’s going to nail you to the wall by your balls.”

“Oh, yeah, terrific. You telling me you don’t have any leads?”

Cushing’s sarcasm made Don Leeland shift his feet. Lee-land was Cushing’s polar opposite. Of middle height with a physique that would one day be chubby, he had large, sorrowful eyes that, together with his full mustache, reminded Palma of a young walrus. Having a benign demeanor, he kept his head down and did his work, leaving all the razzle-dazzle to his partner. Unlike Cushing, who had developed his knowledge of human nature from working the streets, Leeland was not cynical and combative. He had come to homicide from crime analysis, and his investigative instincts relied more heavily on research and a logical methodology than gut feeling. Together they made a strong team, but Leeland was never comfortable with Cushing’s style.