Mercy (81 page)

Neither she nor Grant nor Cushing spoke as they waited for the other two men to get in place. Grant hadn’t said anything since they had gotten out of the cars, and she wondered what he was thinking of the way she was handling it. She wondered if he always took the backseat in these situations or if he was doing so in this instance because of her. She decided it was his character. It would have been an insult to him to believe otherwise.

It seemed like a long wait, but it was actually less than ten minutes before, “Leeland, ready,” came over the radio, followed a minute later by, “Birley, ready.”

Leaving Cushing with the cars, she and Grant walked up the drive toward the front of the house. As they approached the rear of the two Mercedeses, Grant moved to the edges of the cars and looked inside while Palma walked up to the front door. The doorbell was not lighted, and Palma looked around at Grant, who was now looking in the other side of the cars. She reached in her purse and took out her set of picks, an expensive set that had been her father’s and which she had learned how to use while she was still in high school. She already had the picks working up the pins when Grant joined her on the steps, and before he could say anything she felt the rotor moving and the lock clicked open.

“I didn’t hear the doorbell,” she explained, adhering to the letter of truth if not the spirit, and the moment she spoke it occurred to her why Grant had stayed behind and shown so much interest in the two parked cars. He had worked with a lot of law-enforcement agencies, both large and small, and with all kinds of officers, straitlaced and devious. He probably had learned a long time ago that sometimes it was best for special agents acting as advisers to local agencies not to know all the details of the way the local officers ran their operations. Unoccupied cars and doorbells that couldn’t be heard. There was, after all, a relationship.

Palma was aware of perspiration soaking through her Egyptian cotton by the time she pushed open the door and felt the waft of cold air from Broussard’s air-conditioning system. She was reminded of the morning she had walked into Dorothy Samenov’s condo and the chill of a lowered thermostat had foreshadowed a deeper, stranger chill of another kind.

If the entry had activated an alarm system, Cushing would intercept the call or the investigating officers. Palma and Grant stood in the foyer, letting their eyes and ears get used to the darkness and the silence in the house. Simultaneously they both readied their handguns, Palma remembering the incident in the hallway of Broussard’s office when he had confronted them. She knew they ran that risk here as well, but chose to gamble for the chance of catching him unexpectedly. She saw the entry into the dining room and another room past that with the glow of the city sky seeping in through the dozens of small panes of the French doors that lined the far side of the living room beyond.

She looked at Grant, who nodded at her, and then she started toward the dining room, pausing at a transecting hallway and looking both ways before she continued, skirting the table and dining chairs around to the other side, where she paused before entering the living room. It was a long room, stretching across much of the bottom floor, with its length contiguous with the terrace. Waiting a moment, she scanned the long line of French doors and then saw Birley standing where two door frames came together and provided a thin barrier for him to stand against. She carefully crossed the room and approached the doors, running her hand up the facing until she found a latch, turned it, and opened the door for Birley. She saw the glint of his Colt in the faint light.

Now that the glow from the city sky was at their backs and illuminating the room in front of them, they moved quickly back through the living room and dining room to Grant, who was still waiting in the entry hall. A long stairway went up to the second floor from either side of the entry, and Grant motioned to his left, meaning that was the direction that would take them to the end of the house where the bedroom window was lighted. Palma nodded, and he let her pass him and start up the stairs first. She felt a warm spot growing hotter in the center of her chest as she mounted the stairs carefully but without hesitation.

When she reached the landing, there was no confusion about which way she should go along the mezzanine. To her right the mezzanine continued across the foyer below and toward the stairs on the other side of the entry and to bedroom doors beyond that. To her left, maybe fifteen feet away, a door was open and a lemon light spilled out into the hallway. Palma noted the color of the light and decided it was much too yellow to have been the result of a small-wattage bulb. There was another explanation.

She moved aside to let Grant and Birley gain the landing also, and then motioned to them that she would go ahead. The three of them approached the opened doorway and waited, listening, trying to get some audible bearing. The bedroom door opened in a corner of the room, and along the wall to Palma’s left were the windows that had been visible to them from the front of the house. On the other side of the door, on Palma’s right, a short wing wall created a mini-foyer before the room itself opened up on the same side and ran the depth of the house.

Palma moved carefully, grateful for the thick, expensive carpet, and actually stepped through the bedroom doorway into the small foyer behind the wing wall. As soon as she did so, her heart sank as she smelled the familiar perfume that had pervaded each of the rooms where the other victims had been found. But here, mixed with it, there was another smell too, a faint pungent odor as if something were scorching. And then she heard something familiar, the hissing sibilants of whispering. With adrenaline punching her nerves like a hot prod, she looked around as Grant and Birley moved in close behind her. Then with a sharp nod she stepped out from behind the wing wall and took a firing stance with both hands, her arms pointed straight out to the bed across the room as Grant and Birley burst past her and did the same, one right after the other so that all three of them were crouched in standing firing positions, looking down the lengths of their arms and over the tops of their guns at the macabre sight on the bed twenty feet away.

The room was poorly lighted by a single lamp that sat on a reading table beside the bed. Several yellow scarves had been thrown over the lampshade, one draped directly onto the bulb, which was creating the scorched odor.

Palma could not immediately understand what she was seeing on the bed, stripped of all its cover except its top sheet, but what she saw in the next few seconds confused her and then numbed her so quickly that she forgot herself, forgot to move, or even to breathe. There were two naked bodies, both with long blond hair, both with faces painted like all the previous victims. The body that lay on its back was thickly set, its eyes wide open and glassy. Two huge and irregular circular wounds appeared where the breasts had been and the body had been so severely bitten that from where Palma stood, the person appeared to be thickly covered with smallpox welts. A single stringy, gray entrail extruded from the navel and lay across the stomach, and the pubic region had been completely resected so that the gender of the victim was obscured. Or would have been if Palma had not had such a grim familiarity with the mutilated human anatomy. The thick set of the waist and the narrow hips, the almost right angles of the abdominal muscles and the dark patterns of body and leg hair told her the mutilated body was a man, and even as she comprehended this her eyes were shifting to the second nude figure, a body as exquisitely lovely as the other was nauseous. The woman lay on her side beside the corpse, ignoring them, her attentions fixed hypnotically on the painted, mutilated man, the foot of her top leg stroking his ankle seductively, her head resting beside his on her bent arm while the long, graceful fingers of her free hand traced idly around the two wounds on either side of the man’s chest. Her own long, buttery hair mixed with the flowing locks of the man’s wig as she arched her neck to keep her lips next to his ears. Transfixed by the discordant imagery of what she was seeing, her emotions in disarray, Palma was startled to feel a sob rising in her chest, and then she was startled again to feel it stop. In the near silence the three of them stood in stunned awe listening to Mary Lowe’s whispered gabblings to Dr. Dominick Broussard, apologies and groanings and supplications, reminders of the way it once had been for them, before their long flight through the dingy towns of Dixie, before the seductions and the betrayals, before she had become her father’s whore and her mother’s venging angel.

Epilogue

T
he media storm that followed Mary Lowe’s arrest was unprecedented and, within twelve hours, international. The idea of Lady Cop Gets Lady Killer with its facile double entendre and sex-and-death formula made the case immediate headline and lead-story material. The moment Mary Lowe was booked, the security was stepped up at the police department and then at the county jail, where she was taken to the women’s ward only half a dozen blocks away on the northern edge of downtown and on the southern bank of Buffalo Bayou. For the first few weeks everyone even remotely connected with the case was hounded by the media, looking for a wedge, however small, by which they hoped to open up the story. As the days passed and the police department released enough information to bleed off the intense pressure created by a breaking story, the supporting cast received less and less attention.

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.