Mercy (76 page)

“Do you know,” Grant said to Mirel, “if Broussard—or Boll—ever saw any of these women aside from these instances?”

“Well, you know, I’m not sure about that,” she said. “I wondered about that myself. I mean, he asked to see Dorothy the first time, so I guess he knew her from somewhere. Let’s see, then he saw Louise with Dorothy, and Vickie with Dorothy. Then he asked to see Sandy Moser, so I guess maybe he knew her somehow, too. Uh, I think he saw Nancy Seiver with Moser, or maybe Kittrie, or maybe that was Carol Loch. But I know he asked to see Mary Lowe, because she was a pretty recent addition.”

“Did any of them ever mention him, Dominick Broussard?”

“Nope.”

“Do you know anything else regarding his interest in sadomasochism besides his coming to your place and watching these women?” Grant asked.

“Nope.”

“How did he happen to learn about you?” Palma asked. “Did he just walk in one day?”

Mirel shook her head again. “Nobody jus’ walks into my place,” she said with evident pride, though perhaps not everyone would understand the cause of her smugness. “It’s not like I was in the Yella Pages. References. Somebody’s got to put you onto me. And I don’t accept anybody, either. I mean,” she snorted.

“So who recommended him to you?”

Again Mirel squirmed a little with embarrassment, which she then immediately attempted to cover up with a cocky explanation.

“Look, I’ve been around the block with people like this,” she said. “I see ‘em walk in the door I know if they’re masos or sados or some kind of jerk-off combination. You got to trust your gut with these people ‘cause they don’t think like the rest of us. They got hang-ups you wouldn’t believe. Reason I’m alive right now is ‘cause I know my way around these people, can smell a screwball a mile away. Maggie gets in touch with me, I know exactly what I’m into. Just a harmless peeper. Not even all that weird. Offers big bucks to watch a lady he knows. I can tell. No problem here. And there’s big bucks. One thing he wanted was that they didn’t know he was watching. Fine. I know he’s not going to pull anything funny. I mean, I’m watching him. My instincts told me all I needed to know. Guy was harmless. Hell, if he knew Dorothy…” Mirel shrugged as if that was self-explanatory.

Palma looked at her. Listening to Mirel’s “explanation” of how her reference system worked—that is, not at all—made her furious. The woman was despicable. She jabbed her pen and notebook into her purse.

“I’ll tell you what,” she snapped. “I think you’d better have your instincts examined. And you’d better hire yourself another lawyer. I don’t think one is going to be enough.”

If Mirel’s mouth could have dropped open it would have, but as it was she simply rolled her head and widened her eyes at Palma’s back as Palma strode out of the room without looking at Grant.

She waited near the nurses’ station halfway down the hall while Grant probably thanked Mirel for her help, going through all the crap that goes along with having to be a public servant. Sometimes Palma found the stupidity of people like Mirel Farr too infuriating to deal with rationally. With every year that passed she was finding it increasingly difficult to convince herself that each person on earth had as much intrinsic worth as the next. She had grown up with that concept persistently impressed upon her by her mother, whose unflagging religious faith had, admittedly, carried her through many thin and arduous times. But there were many days when Palma just didn’t swallow the idea. Some lives evidenced no discernible value whatsoever. It would be difficult to ascribe any positive worth at all to Mirel Farr.

Palma’s beeper startled her. She checked the number, saw it was Frisch’s, and walked up to the nurses’ station and asked them to tell the man who would be coming out of Farr’s room that she had gone down to use the telephone outside the waiting room.

Frisch sounded tired.

“How’s it going?” he asked.

Palma brought him up to date on what they had learned about Broussard from Alice Jackson, and what they had just heard from Mirel Farr.

“I’d be surprised if Grant doesn’t have some proactive suggestions after this,” she said. “He’s being very cautious about it, but Broussard’s been all over these women for a long time. He’s known some of them as long as they’ve known each other. He knows a hell of a lot about them, and I don’t think he’d have any trouble getting next to them, even during all this scare. Besides that, these women aren’t the kind who scare too easily anyway.”

She looked out the glass door of the booth and saw Grant waiting, leaning against the wall with his hands in his pockets. He was staring straight ahead, lost in thought, facing away from the waiting room, which looked like a scene from a refugee camp. Because Ben Taub was a charity hospital, certain of its waiting rooms were often crowded with the indigent friends and relatives of the indigent patients. It was no trick to grow depressed simply staring into the passive faces of people who seemed perpetually exhausted.

“Grant’s outside now. We haven’t had time to go over Farr’s interview. Let us hash it out, and we’ll get back to you in half an hour, or we’ll be back to the station to talk. Anything happening?”

“Nothing,” Frisch sounded irritable. “Reynolds hasn’t budged, and his girlfriend’s still with him. Nothing’s moved at Broussard’s. I hope to hell he isn’t laying her out in there.”

“Grant swears it won’t happen. Not at his place,” Palma said. “It’ll have to be somewhere else.”

“Shit.” Frisch was impatiently skeptical. It was rare for him either to swear or be rude, or even show that much emotion. She could imagine what the atmosphere was like at the station and was glad she wasn’t there.

“Anybody turn up anything canvassing Hardeman’s neighbors?” she asked.

“Nothing.” Frisch turned away from the telephone and she heard him tell someone to shut the damn door, and then he was back on. “Nobody saw anything. This guy’s got to be the luckiest bastard going. Vickie’s car turned up in the parking lot of the Houston Racquet Club.”

“What about the lab reports on her?” Palma asked. “Did LeBrun come up with anything? What about the autopsy?”

“Yeah, actually we have gotten something from the lab, just a few minutes ago.” Frisch turned away from the telephone again, and she heard him asking someone for the lab report. She looked outside at Grant. He hadn’t moved, literally. He looked like a mannequin. “Yeah,” Frisch said to somebody, and she could hear him shuffling papers and someone, she thought it was Leeland, talking to him. “Okay, here it is. On the head hair LeBrun found on Hardeman’s bed with Kittrie, we’ve got a matchup with the unidentified head hair found at Samenov’s. LeBrun also picked up pubic hairs on Kittrie that match the two unknown, single-source, pubic hairs found on Samenov. However, they can’t tell us whether the unknown head hair and pubic hair found on Samenov and Kittrie came from the same person or whether they’re male or female.”

“So the hairs could be from two people or from one person.”

“Right.”

“And they don’t know the sex.”

“Right. But we do know—regardless of whether it’s one or two people—that he or they were with both Samenov and Kittrie sometime shortly before their deaths.”

“And they don’t know if it’s wig hair yet?”

“No, but they know that wig hair has been treated with some kind of preservative. They’re trying to nail that down now, and then they can test for it. It’s going to take a while.”

“What’s a while?”

“It depends on what the preservative chemical is.”

“Damn. The pubic hair,” Palma said suddenly. “Broussard’s hair is black. If it’s his, it’ll have to be bleached or dyed. Have them check it.”

Frisch made a few muffled remarks to someone. “And one more thing,” he added. “They found a couple of fibers in Kittrie’s dress. They think they’re pieces of a fiber mesh, stuff that kinda of looks like horsehair, that some foreign-car manufacturers use to mold their car seats. Mercedes people use it, Volkswagen people use it, or used to. Anyway, they’re trying to narrow down the possibilities.”

“Broussard drives a Mercedes.”

“Yeah, we know. We’re trying to determine if we can risk sneaking somebody up to the house to snatch some of it. Anyway, listen, get back to me soon.” Frisch had to raise his voice because of the background noise. “Leeland’s being flooded with calls from people turning in their creepy neighbors, and we’ve got a dozen of our guys trying to follow these up. But aside from that and what you two are coming up with, the investigation’s ground to a standstill. The media are all over us, and the politicians, and as of this afternoon some women’s organization says we’re not pursuing this with enough conviction. And I suppose a charge of ineptitude and mismanagement will be coming soon from the guy who wants to be the next police chief. The people in Hunters Creek have formed some kind of female buddy patrols and the village police are being run ragged checking out peeper calls, false reports of bodies in the bayous, all that sort of thing. We’re catching a lot of heat, and we’re seeing a lot of brass in the squad room now. Everybody looking in personally, that sort of thing. Everybody wants in on the big one.”

Palma hung up and looked at Grant again. This time he was looking at her, and she opened the door.

“Give me one more minute. They’ve got some interesting lab results. One more quick call.”

She closed the door again and put in another quarter. This time she dialed the number that rang on Barbara Soronno’s desk.

60

P
alma didn’t say anything right away. She wanted a moment to try to sort out how the information fit in, and now that her hunch had paid off and she had the results she expected to find, she also wanted time to examine her own intuition, to understand what it was that had made her ask Barbara Soronno to conduct such an unusual test in the first place. It was an eerie feeling, especially in light of the fact she didn’t know what leap of logic had put her onto the startling discovery.

“What’s the matter?” Grant asked.

“Nothing,” she said, stepping out of the booth and coming across to him. “Just trying to understand the data, where they fit in.” She told him everything that Frisch had said and watched his face as he assimilated the information and factored it into his own peculiar arrangement of what he knew of the four murders. Palma had the feeling that, like her, Grant was not telling everything he was thinking.

A child shrieked in the waiting room, and a shouting match broke out between a furtive Vietnamese clan and a trio of stocky black women whose dusky scowls, flared nostrils, and flashing ruddy tongues made them formidable adversaries for the smaller Asians.

Grant bowed his head in thought and moved slowly around the corner to the long antiseptic hallway where the odors of alcohol and medication replaced the human odors of the overcrowded waiting room.

“Vickie Kittrie and an unknown person had been with Dorothy Samenov before she died,” he mused. “An unknown person had been with Kittrie before her death. The unidentified head hair is blond—wig or not—and the pubic hair is also blond.”

“Dyed or natural,” Palma said.

Grant nodded without saying anything, his eyes fixed on the far end of the glistening hallway.

He said, “But no physical evidence from a third person on Vickie’s body, or any of the other victims, for that matter.”

This was as far as Palma could let him go without telling him what Barbara Soronno had found. Palma didn’t know what Grant was puzzling out, but it had to do with a third person, and Palma had come up with physical evidence of a third person with Vickie Kittrie.

“There was a third person in Vickie’s case,” she said outright. Grant stopped. He looked at her. They were halfway down the length of the long hall, midway between another nurses’ station and an intersecting hallway. Grant put his hands in his pockets again and leaned against the painted wall. In a room not far away an aspirator was sucking noisily at some kind of human fluid, keeping cadence with a rattily, uneven respiration. Grant waited, regarding her from behind the crooked bridge of his nose with a becalmed concentration, prepared for something revelatory. In the sterile white light of the hospital corridor his hazel eyes complemented the brindled colors of his graying mustache.

“I just learned this a moment ago, when I made the second telephone call,” she said. “I would have told you about it, but it was such a…crazy long shot, and I didn’t want to appear…unreasonable.” Grant was as unresponsive as a sphinx. “This morning, just before we left Janice Hardeman’s, I grabbed Jeff Chin and told him to take special care of the tampon in Kittrie’s vagina. I told him to mark it for Barbara Soronno’s attention. Then I called Barbara and asked her what the chances were of getting a clean type from it. It all depended on how saturated the tampon was. When she got it, Barbara cut into it and took some fibers from the very center of it and typed it. It was clean. It wasn’t contaminated.”

Grant’s face was already registering surprise. “It wasn’t Vickie’s type?”

“No,” Palma said. “It wasn’t.”

“Broussard’s blood type is on his medical records,” Grant said quickly. “We can get it.”

“It’s not his blood either,” Palma said.

“You know his blood type?”

“No. But after Barbara determined the blood inside the tampon wasn’t Kittrie’s, I asked her to run an additional test. The blood on the interior of the tampon contained no plasminogen and no fibrin, which means it didn’t have the ability to coagulate. It was menstrual blood, but not Vickie’s.”

“Je-sus Christ,” Grant said. He looked at her. “You knew this?”

Palma shook her head. “No. Of course I didn’t. I don’t know why I even asked her to run the test. It wasn’t even an official assay. Barbara did it on the side, as a favor.”

“Well, what in the hell did you have in mind?” Grant was astounded. He seemed to be as amazed at why she had asked for the test as he was at the test’s results.

“I told you.”

“Did you think it would be menstrual blood?”

“I just thought…maybe, I don’t know, that we ought to type it.”

“And when it wasn’t Vickie’s type…”