Mercy (71 page)

“The main element that’s affected me from the beginning of these cases,” she said, “has been the bite marks. I know they’re common in sexual homicides, but these aren’t common sexual homicides. Not to me, anyway.”

“Not to you?”

“I don’t mind admitting to a strong personal reaction to these from the beginning. It’s not anything I can focus on, I mean I can’t identify any key element that makes them different for me, but something’s there. And the bite marks, well, I’ve seen bite marks before, but these turned my stomach. Then with Bernadine Mello I saw the deliberate centering on the navel, then this morning…the whole thing…gone.”

She turned her head, looked out to Louisiana Street, where the cabbies were lined up outside the hotel. Some of them were sitting in their cars with their doors open, out of the sun but not out of the heat, the buses and the traffic throwing up as much as the sun was throwing down, and the asphalt and the cement, already heated to capacity, weren’t taking any more and were reflecting it back like heat lamps.

She turned back to Grant.

“You’ve been in this business a while, seen a lot of things,” she said. “Maybe you’ve seen eyelids cut away before. I haven’t. Maybe you’ve seen navels sucked out of people’s bellies. I haven’t. But for me, the missing eyelids don’t hold a candle to that eviscerated navel.” She lowered her voice, unable to keep out the tonal strain of her tightening throat. “He didn’t remove the eyelids with his mouth,” she said with deliberation. “But that’s damn sure the way he took out her navel.”

She saw that Grant’s eyes were leveled at her with the same seeing-unseeing gaze that he had had when he was looking at the picture of Denise Kaplan, his mind having gone way beyond the immediate focus of their concentration, and his next question sent a hot rush up from her stomach.

“How do you know that?” he asked.

Palma looked at him. Neither of them blinked. Jesus Christ, she thought.

“That’s what it’s like,” he said. His face was an odd mixture of grim knowing and restrained excitement. “It doesn’t always happen, doesn’t always come to you like this, but when it does, there’s really nothing like it. When you tap into one of these guys…there’s really nothing like it.”

Palma reached for her glass of water and took a long drink to quench the fire in her stomach. She was stunned. She remembered what Grant had said during their second telephone conversation. He had told her that her objective ought to be to start thinking like the killer. Jokingly, she had replied, “No problem.” But Grant had not been that amused. It was too late for her not to have a problem, he had said. If she didn’t start thinking like the murderer, then she had a problem. And if she did start thinking like the murderer, then she still had a problem, only it was a problem of another sort. At the time, she really hadn’t known what he was talking about. Now she was afraid she did. What in the hell had she gotten herself into?

“Look,” Grant said, bringing her back. He was talking slowly, as if he were coaching her through it, knowing what she was feeling and wanting to reassure her. “You’ve just discovered something about yourself that’s extraordinary. It’s an unnerving realization for anyone, in whatever field of human endeavor, to come face-to-face with a special ability…a gift. It sets you apart in secret ways, in ways that you know you can’t explain, or even admit to anyone else. And it presents you with a burden, and a choice. Either you pick up the burden and carry it, or you don’t. It’s a choice you can’t afford to make lightly, because it’s going to have lifetime consequences. All I’m trying to say is that it’s nothing magical or freakish. It’s just…just like having a hunch, only it’s more intense than that. You’ve got to have the guts to give it free rein, to let it get into you and develop. Accept it. If you can do that, if you’ve got that kind of genius and don’t use it…it would be wrong. You can’t afford to be afraid of it.”

Palma fought a sense of suffocation. A warm, feverish glow spread over her, and she was sure she was flushed. She took another drink of water, and then looked at him.

“You’re saying…that you think he actually did that?” she asked.

“You told me that’s what he did,” Grant said.

Palma nodded. She had been convinced, but now she realized it had been an unconscious certitude until Grant had pointed it out to her.

“Yeah, I believe it happened that way,” Grant affirmed. “Or at least it’s so close to the way it happened that we can begin predicating some of our investigative decisions based upon that ‘theory.’ That’s the way it works. You play it down. You follow your ‘hunches,’ and they prove to be remarkably accurate. People will accept that kind of prescience if you call it a ‘hunch.’ Cops are proud of their hunches. But you can’t say what it really feels like, that it’s as if you’d been there yourself.”

He took a drink of water himself and then shoved aside his half-eaten breakfast and looked at her as a wry grin eased onto his face.

“The fact is,” he said, “I had sensed that you were getting more out of this than I was. I’m stumped here, but you seem to be connecting on a different level. I still think my profile analysis is correct; I can’t see anything I’d change. But I have to face the fact, too, that it isn’t meshing with our primary suspect. This whole thing seems to be drifting in the wrong direction for me. I think you can put us back on course.”

Palma was uneasy. Grant was making it sound like she had all the answers, that breaking the case was up to her. “I’ll have to be honest with you,” she said. “I don’t think I understand what’s going on here as much as you seem to believe I do. It really is only a hunch. You’re making it sound much more…developed than it is. I mean, I’m sticking with my gut feelings on this…but if you haven’t noticed, I’m still having mixed signals. I said ‘he’ took out Kittrie’s navel with ‘his’ mouth. But I’m sticking with the idea of a female killer. It feels consistent.”

Grant came back at her quickly, with a steely urgency.

“Intuition, this kind of ‘insight,’ is not an exact thing,” he said. “It has to be…accommodated. It’s a slender vision of another mind, and you have to have the strength and the faith to let it guide you to ideas you’ve never imagined. That’s why it seems amorphous, unclear. You’re following, not leading. It requires a rare courage to give yourself to an inner voice.”

Grant was leaning on the table, his eyes leveled at her with a slight, crimped earnestness. His brief exposition had been ardent, a word she normally would not have associated with him. It was disconcerting.

“Let’s at least double-check Broussard against the list of the profile characteristics you gave us,” Palma said, wanting to reduce the wire-tight tension she was beginning to feel in her brain. She wanted something mundane, something routine and structured to concentrate on. “Good intelligence.”

“Check,” Grant said. He seemed to understand what she was feeling. “Broussard obviously has that.”

“Socially competent.”

“My gut tells me he’s in the cellar on that,” Grant said. “We don’t know that yet, but that’s what we’re going to find out. Let’s say I’m right. That’s a negative.”

“Sexually competent.”

“My nose tells me the same thing. Broussard’s as screwed up as the women he consults.”

“Inconsistent childhood discipline.”

“That we don’t know. Again, my gut tells me it was a mess.”

“Living with a partner.”

“No.”

“Follows crime in the news media.”

“If we can believe him, he says no.”

“Precipitating situational stress.”

“We don’t know, but I’d say we’ll find something there.”

“The man’s married and has children.”

“Not Broussard.”

“Kept souvenirs from the killings.”

“Of course, we don’t know. But with Broussard—as opposed to Reynolds—we’ll find some. I’m sure of it.”

“The importance of fantasy.”

“I’m dead-solid on that one. Broussard’s a fantasizing fool.”

She stopped. “That’s most of them.”

“By my count,” Grant said, “Broussard fits four out of ten of the characteristics this killer should have. We never expect to have all of them right, but we hope to have a better ratio than that. And I, personally, usually have a hell of a lot better ratio than that.”

Palma took another sip of water. The thought of the coffee she had badly wanted half an hour earlier nauseated her.

“I think you’re being a little hard on yourself,” she said. “You guessed at many of those characteristics. We simply don’t know Broussard that well. I think we ought to have this conversation again after we talk to Alice Jackson. With a little luck, things could look a lot different.”

56

A
lice Jackson lived less than a dozen blocks from Texas Southern University, which was established by the Texas legislature in 1947 as the Texas State University for Negroes. The legislative move was not, as it might seem, the result of an educationally enlightened state political body, but rather an effort by Jim Crow politicians to stave off ambitious blacks who more and more were beginning to go to court to obtain admission to the state university. As it was, blacks were not admitted to the Texas state university system of schools until 1950, but the efforts to prevent them from doing so established a university that now had an enrollment of more than eight thousand predominantly black students, most of them from the city of Houston.

The neighborhood had fallen on hard times. In fact, no one there could remember anything but hard times, though there were many who now claimed that in addition to hard, things were also getting mean, too damn mean. Just a few blocks to the east of Alice Jackson’s street, the Gulf Freeway kept up a constant roar of traffic going to and from the coast, and a few blocks to the west the South and Southwest freeways kept up a constant roar sending traffic south toward Mexico. Alice Jackson never went to either place. She stayed close to home and watched the things that used to be pass away and the things that shouldn’t be take their place. Not too far away in Emancipation Park the kids of the ward worked their way to hell at nights, giving each other cocaine and heroin and new diseases and drug-ridden little babies that the welfare system had to clean up and their grandmamas had to raise. Hope was the name of a few of the older girls in the local high schools, but that was all any of the kids knew about the word. And even the grown-ups had let the word slip out of their vocabulary in recent years. There weren’t any Hopes below the eighth grade.

Alice Jackson watched this strange, sad pageant of her neighborhood from the front porch of her small brick house that distinguished itself from all the other houses on her street by its neatness. Not only did Alice’s tiny front yard have grass on it, but the grass was mowed. The front porch railings were painted. She regularly killed the persistent weeds that sprang up in the cracks of her cement driveway, even though she didn’t have a car to park in it. She washed her windows. Three times a week she went to church at the River of Jordan Baptist Church around the corner, and it was only because of this regular and highly emotional exposure to the idea of the possibilities of a better world that Alice Jackson was able to look upon all the decay that went on around her with a kind of philosophical composure. She kept her backbone straight and her heart soft and waited with the rest of the congregation for that day “farther along when we’ll understand why.”

Pink and mauve and lavender petunias were blooming in faded clay pots on the steps of Alice’s front porch when Palma and Grant pulled up to the curb in front of her house around twelve-thirty. Palma took in the derelict street and Alice’s neat little brick house and began to form judgments about the woman she was about to interview. The petunias had been recently watered and the dark patches on the cement steps were still glistening in the sun as they made their way up to the porch and knocked on the screen door. The cooking smells of a Sunday meal wafted out to them on the warm air.

“Baked ham,” Grant observed in a low voice, and Palma thought of the different smells she remembered in a different part of the city, smells of the barrio instead of the ward.

Before she had a chance to say anything, the face of Alice Jackson appeared on the other side of the screen door, a dark face with sharp, chiseled features arranged in a questioning expression and the amber palm of a long-fingered hand placed cautiously on the face of the screen.

“Ms. Alice Jackson?” Palma asked.

The woman nodded. “I am.”

“My name is Carmen Palma and this is Mr. Grant.” Palma pulled her shield out of her purse and held it up for Alice Jackson to see. “I’m with the Houston Police Department, and Mr. Grant is with the FBI. Would you have a few minutes to talk to us?”

Alice Jackson hesitated. “Regarding what, ma’am?” She spoke slowly, politely. She wore a dark Swiss-dot dress with a broad white collar. Her hair was long and pulled back in a bun, and at the front of her hairline and to the left side of the off-center part was a broad streak of gray that was combed back toward her bun in a gentle, wiry wave.

“We’re part of a team of detectives who are investigating a series of homicides in the city,” Palma said. “We’re questioning people who live or work in Hunters Creek, where some of the victims lived, and we understand you’re employed in that area.”

“Yes, I am,” she said. She looked at Grant, regarded him leisurely, and nodded. “I sure am.” She looked back at Palma. “I guess you better come on in.” She pushed open the screen and stepped back.

As tall as Palma, Alice Jackson was a thin woman with a slow, proud carriage, and a gentle manner. She offered them seats on a small sofa in a pin-neat living room and offered them something to drink, which they both refused. Sitting forward in an armchair opposite them, she very naturally crossed her low-heeled feet at the ankles and folded her hands in her lap. She did not appear to be uncomfortable having these two white police detectives in her home, despite the fact that she lived in an area where neither the police nor white people were common visitors, and when they were they were universally unwelcome. She cocked her head slightly forward and waited for Palma to explain further.