Mercy (18 page)

Broussard looked at Lowe’s legs. The hem of her sundress was riding just under her knees, and even though she was not wearing stockings her legs were as smooth and tan as a mannequin’s. But her feet betrayed her flesh and blood, especially her blood, for several long blue veins ran along the underside of her ankle and down the top of her foot toward her toes. These were not the swollen veins of older women, but the smooth veins of health, strengthened by several hours of tennis daily. And her skin was fair enough that he knew, too, that if he could see her nude he would see similar veins, though paler, more subtle, in one or two places around her breasts.

“Mother had discovered all the wealth of the Borgias in one prematurely balding executive eight years older than herself,” Mary continued. “And she was not about to let it slip away. Keeping Douglas happy became her one aim in life, and she made sure that I realized the importance in this too. At her constant urging, I thanked him so many times that first year that it must have been sadly comical. And I was thankful, of course, but Mother had me fawning on him to the point of embarrassment.

“One day when I got out of school he was there waiting for me. He had gotten away from the office early and had called Mother and told her he would pick me up at school. I suspected later that he had planned it so he could talk to me away from her. In the course of our conversation during the drive home, he tactfully let me know that it wasn’t actually necessary for me to be so constantly grateful. He said that there was an art to accepting someone’s kindness and that there were many ways to express gratitude without having to say thank you all the time. He said he knew I was appreciative and that that was reward enough for him. He said other understanding things too, kind things, as if he knew just how I felt and wanted to put me at ease. He spoke to me as though I were a whole person, worthy of his full attention. I had never been talked to that way before.

“That was a magical afternoon for me, because after that I began to be drawn into a feeling of security that I had never known in my life. He won me over, heart and soul, during that brief drive home from school, and it was never to be the same again. I grew to love the man dearly. I was ten.”

Broussard tensed. Premonition had been an unexpected consequence, an ensuant gift, of his years of practicing psychoanalysis. It was not something he had anticipated or tried to develop, but it came to him as a natural result of his refinement by continual practice of his own innermost abilities. It was not a gift he had come to regard with unmixed feelings. Though it had proved to be an enabling talent that had allowed him to better enlighten his clients, it had also had the effect of oppressing him. He was like a man who had been given a magic sack filled with a hundred pounds of gold coins. No matter how many he spent the sack was always full, but in order to have access to the coins he must carry it on his back. If he ever took it off, the gold and all the good it could do in the world would cease to exist. The blessing, and his ability to use it, was also an inescapable burden.

The prescience was not a clearly defined knowledge, so that when it occurred he was racked with anxiety until he could decipher it, unriddle it, and employ the new understanding to help his client. So it was with a growing sense of dread that he listened to Mary Lowe’s story, knowing, surely, that today or the next, or the next, her story would turn dark, very dark indeed.

“Those dreams I dreaded, of disintegrating? They began to go away,” she said. “Everything was fine for a year.” She didn’t go on.

Broussard waited. He looked at his clock. She was capable of extraordinary silences. But not this time.

“You have something to drink here, don’t you?” She turned her head toward him.

“Yes.” But he didn’t move.

“May I have a little bit of vodka?”

“Stoli?”

“Fine.”

He got up from his armchair and went to the cabinet where he poured a glass for both of them. When he turned around she had gotten up from the chaise and was standing at the window, looking outside. She had gathered her skirt in her hands and was holding it up above her knees as if she were going wading. He walked up behind her.

“Stoli,” he said.

She dropped the left side of her skirt and held her hand up over her shoulder without turning around. He handed it to her, and she sipped without hesitation, still holding half her skirt in her right hand. He was close enough to smell her. She casually moved along the glass wall to the foot of the chaise.

“How long have you had this office?” she asked.

“About eight years.”

“Oh?”

He waited.

“You’ve heard a lot of stories here, then, spent a lot of afternoons looking down to the bayou.”

“Quite a few,” he said.

“Do you like hearing them?”

“It’s not a matter of liking them,” he said. “I try to use them to help people.”

“You must hear a lot of the same stories,” she said into the plate glass. “At least, similar ones.”

He knew better than to answer that one. Everyone wanted to believe his story was unique. He was thinking of this, looking at her hair falling across her bare shoulders, when he realized that she had continued to gather the right side of her skirt in her hand until almost her entire right thigh was showing. It was an extraordinary sight.

“What kind of a story do you like?” she asked.

There was a moment, and then he managed to say, “I don’t have any preferences.”

“Everyone has preferences,” she said.

He said nothing, his eyes transfixed on her long, tan thigh. Then her wrist flicked and the hem dropped a little, then a twitch, and it fell a little farther. Her fingers held the rest of it. Then, slowly, she began to gather it again, and the tan thigh emerged from the folds of the sundress with the same erotic impact of total nudity. He didn’t know why he looked up just then, but he did, and was startled to see her looking at him from her reflection in the glass. She did not smile or have the vixen-eyed gaze of calculated seduction, but she was watching him. He had no idea what to make of her expression, but it seemed to him—and he was almost sure of it—that she was absorbed in a well-practiced fantasy which had become, through many hours of indulgence, an absolute reality for her. Whatever it was, she was living it as surely as Broussard himself was living this very moment.

15

W
hen Palma got back to her office she found a message to call Clay Garrett. Taking twice the time he should have, Garrett told her he had faxed her request up to Quantico. He said he had already talked to them about the case and that she would be hearing from an agent named Sander Grant. The VICAP forms would be processed overnight, and she should be hearing from one of their analysts within the next couple of days as to any possible matches in the violent crime databank.

Palma thanked him, hung up the receiver, and flipped on her computer. Helena Saulnier was first. A driver’s license check: nothing. Person inquiry: nothing, neither of her names showed up as an ID name or an alias. National Criminal Information Center: she was not wanted on any criminal charges.

Texas Criminal Information Center: she was not wanted for questioning in any crimes. Pawns: she hadn’t pawned anything within the past six months or sold anything to a pawnshop within the last week. Location check: no record of the police ever having been called to her residence on Olympia for so much as a Peeping Tom check. Well, it was a long shot.

She did the same for Nathan Isenberg, Wayne Canfield, and Gil Reynolds. Again, nothing, except that Reynolds had accumulated too many speeding tickets within a ten-month period in 1986. His driving license had been in jeopardy, but then his violations suddenly stopped and he had managed to redeem himself with his insurance agency over the next several years.

Dennis Ackley was a different story. Almost every screen she called up had something to say about Dorothy Samenov’s ex-husband. From 1967 to the present he had fourteen moving violations, including three DWIs. He had done time in Hunts-ville for the last one. He was known under four different aliases and had been arrested seven times, including three times for aggravated assault against his wife, Dorothy Ann Samenov Ackley. All three times she had refused to press charges, though on the last occasion she requested a restraining order against him. He was paroled on the DWI sentence in August 1988 and on February 1989 a warrant was issued for his arrest on the basis of parole violations. He was also wanted by the Dallas Police Department for questioning in an aggravated assault of a woman in Highland Park four months earlier. A month before that incident he had pawned a pair of Zeiss binoculars along with a 9-mm Smith & Wesson Model 459 automatic pistol.

Palma picked up a pencil and made one additional note. When she had begun her investigation of the Sandra Moser case she had checked with Houston’s central crime analysis division to see if any other homicides in the city had an M.O. pattern resembling what she had seen with Moser. The search had been negative. Now, considering the fact that Ackley was wanted in Dallas for questioning in an assault on a female, she decided to check with their crime analysis unit as well. Additionally, she wanted to check with the crime analysis office of the Department of Public Safety in Austin, which collected statewide information.

The telephone rang and Palma picked it up. It was Birley, still at Samenov’s.

“I’m about to shut down here,” he said, sounding tired, “but I’ve made some progress. I found Samenov’s financial papers, bank statements, income tax returns, personal correspondence, and a photograph of Dennis Ackley. He looks like a real sleazoid. The gal had strange taste. Anyway, I went through the bank statements and the checks first, and I think there’s something a little screwy here.”

Palma could hear him flipping the pages in his notebook, which she knew he was looking at through his cheap plastic half-lens reading glasses that he had bought off a rack at Walgreen’s.

“Beginning in January of last year, she began making periodic withdrawals from one of her two accounts at the Bank of the Southwest. There were eight of these withdrawals last year, and already this year there’ve been two, one in January, one in March.” He read off the dates and Palma jotted them down. “I called the bank to see if there had been any since the last bank statement went out and found out there was a three-thousand-dollar withdrawal a week ago yesterday, three days before she was killed. Those earlier withdrawals ranged from five hundred to three thousand a pop. There didn’t seem to be any pattern to the time or the amount of the withdrawals.”

“She would get cash?”

“Yep. I wonder if she was feeding them to Ackley?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Palma said, and she told him about her conversation with Mancera and of her discovery of Ackley’s criminal record.

“Jesus, that figures,” Birley said. “Anybody who’d let her husband hammer on her that much and not press charges against the bastard is just goofy enough to turn around and give him money too. Women like that, shit.” Birley had a thing about battered women. He didn’t understand them, not even a little.

They talked a few more minutes, and Birley said he would bundle up the stuff he had gotten together and take it home with him, see what else he could come up with overnight. He said he would go home from Samenov’s and see her at the office in the morning.

Palma sat back in her chair and looked at the notes scattered over her desk. She had checked on Cushing and Leeland, who were still at Computron and were staying until the place closed down at five o’clock. It was well after four o’clock now and the homicide division’s evening shift had already come on. There was a new lieutenant, a squad room full of new detectives, and a whole new set of problems.

Suddenly she was exhausted; the sleep she had missed the night before was beginning to take its toll. But she still had to type in her supplements. She called up the appropriate screens and set to work.

It was after five o’clock and she had developed a dull headache by the time she had printed out two copies of her supplement, filed one in the case file, and walked across the squad room and put the other into Frisch’s box. Just as she was making the last turn into the aisle that led to her office, she heard her telephone ringing. She ran through the door and picked it up in mid-ring.

“Hey, thought you’d gone home,” Cushing said. “Have any luck today?”

She told him how their day had gone, beginning with her visit the night before with Andrew Moser. She told him Lee-land’s hunch about the pizza delivery had been right, and then filled him in on her visit to Kittrie, on her interview with Mancera, and on Ackley’s prison and arrest record.

“I like the way this Ackley looks,” Cushing said. “You checked him out with Dallas yet?”

“Haven’t had time. Did you get anything?”

“Samenov’s boss said everything good about her,” Cushing said. She could hear him eating something. “She was conscientious, ambitious, reliable, productive, da-dah, da-dah, da-dah…He didn’t know anything about her private life except that she was divorced. We talked to Canfield.” Cushing kept having to stop to swallow. He was probably eating peanuts. He didn’t say where he was calling from, but she would bet it was a bar. “Also divorced, but he hadn’t dated her in over a year. He said she was good-looking, well built, a good sense of humor, and a sharp lady, but she didn’t want to get sexually involved. Said he didn’t go out with her but two or three times.”

Palma massaged the back of her neck with her free hand. Canfield had said Samenov was attractive, her figure was physically appealing, her personality was enjoyable, and she was intelligent. But she didn’t want to get sexually involved. After a few dates he moved on. Christ, he really knew what to value in a woman. He must have been a quality guy.

“We talked to Segal,” Cushing continued. “She just substantiated what the others had said, nothing really new. But she did say that probably Samenov’s best friend, the one who knew most about her, was Vickie Kittrie. And she said that Ackley gave Samenov some flak now and then, that Samenov would sometimes say she wished to hell he would move out of the city. She knew that Samenov had given him money on a number of occasions. Nobody else at Computron gave us anything substantial.”