Mercy (5 page)

Birley ignored Cushing and moved around to the other side of the bed. “She’s been knocked around a little more. I’m betting this one’s got more busted under that makeup than a jaw and a nose.” He nodded. “And look at the bite marks.”

Palma had already noticed them. She had never been able to acquire an indifference to the sight of teeth marks in a dead woman’s flesh. Of the more common types of behavioral evidence in sex crimes, nothing affected her so strongly as these; nothing seemed more primitive or atavistic. Her mind’s eye always conjured the image of mating lions, the male mounting the cringing lioness from behind, sinking his bared teeth into the back of her neck as he penetrates her.

She moved closer. “There’re more of them, and they’re more vicious. Deeper.”

Birley bent down over the dead woman and sniffed near her face. “Perfume. The son of a bitch put perfume on her this time.”

Palma nodded.

“She’s clean.” Birley was still close to the woman’s face. “I don’t see anything that looks like defense wounds.”

Palma looked around the bedroom. “And he’s either meticulous or there wasn’t anything to clean up. Maybe she was…”

“God…damn…”

The tone of Birley’s voice made Palma swing her head around. Cushing and Leeland moved toward the bed. Birley was only inches away from the dead woman’s face now. “Her eyes aren’t open, Carmen.”

Palma looked at the daydreamer’s eyes which, now that she studied them, seemed wider than the usual heavy-lidded gaze of the dead. She bent down opposite Birley, caught a waft of the perfume, and saw too much of the tops of the gaping eyeballs. A wash of cold spread over her, colder than the air in the frigid room, as she made out a raw, uneven line running across the upper rear of each eyeball where its sticky tissue joined the socket. The bare, milky orbs were as naked as the woman herself. She had no eyelids.

3

F
or a moment Palma couldn’t swallow. During the past several minutes she had been aware of the lump growing in her throat, at first as some ill-defined sensation that did not require her full attention, then as something she could not ignore or swallow. She knew what it was, but it was no less real for that. She shot a quick look around. It wasn’t something she often felt anymore. After the first year or so in homicide she had started checking her emotions at the front door. If she didn’t, it simply took too much out of her. But sometimes, with the sexual homicides, she couldn’t help it, and a vaguely defined anxiety darkened the veiny back reaches of her mind. It became a burdensome shadow she could not escape, regardless of the mental tricks she played or how fervently she wished to rise above it. And it was happening now, answering to a resonating inner chord. Dread surfaced like something corrosive, and it frightened her. She knew that before she finally beat it down again, it was going to take something out of her; it was going to claim a piece of her.

All of this Palma recognized and understood in an instant. But she was already into it, already committed. It had had something to do with the cold, and with the bite marks. Especially the bite marks.

She bent down, too, and studied the raw lines almost hidden in the mucosa above the woman’s eyeballs. This close, she got a strong sense of the perfume, but it was an altered fragrance. Birley had failed to mention the stale smell of death, the first musty odor of the oncoming decay working in the dead woman’s bowels.

“Shit, no eyelids?” Cushing dropped his tough-guy act and bent down beside Palma while Leeland, not so curious about the details, craned his neck from the foot of the bed.

“This is precise work,” Palma said. She shifted her attention to the carved breasts only inches away. “It’s hard to tell if it’s postmortem…the way he’s cleaned her.” She nudged Cushing aside and, bending close, moved past the wounded breasts to the dead woman’s maculated stomach, to the matted caramel wool of her vulva, to the thighs, moving her head from side to side, back and forth, to catch the surface of the body in an angle against the poor lighting. She was trying to find the distinguishing blotches, the scaly, starchy stains of semen. But if she didn’t find them, it wouldn’t be significant. It didn’t always happen; they hadn’t found any on Sandra Moser either. However, it would be significant if they could determine if the dead woman had in fact been cleaned.

Birley looked for the same thing around the wounds on the woman’s breasts and face. “He’s cleaned her mouth before putting on the lipstick,” he said. “Maybe this time there’ll be something inside.” He checked the sides of her body next to the bed sheet, and then watched Palma’s examination. She was thorough.

“I think we’re going to find something on the insides of her thighs,” she said, straightening up. “I believe there’s a smear…going down, just into her left groin.” She straightened up. “But he’s not leaving behind very much.”

“He cut her eyelids last time?” Cushing asked. He was still staring at Samenov’s eyes.

“No,” Palma said. “He didn’t, but he cut off one nipple. That was all. But everything else seems the same: the ligature marks, the positioning, the makeup, the removed bedclothes, the victim’s folded clothes, the bruises, the bite marks. Only it’s more severe this time.”

“The other woman was blond too?” It was the first thing Leeland had said.

Palma nodded and said, “But there’s something else.”

“Yeah, he did something to her.” Birley was still standing beside the bed, his arms folded, thinking. “He licked her or masturbated on her or something…else. That’s why he’s washing them.”

“Fetishist,” Leeland offered soberly. He was writing something on a notepad.

“I could almost buy that if it weren’t so damned convenient,” Palma said. “He’s reducing the trace evidence to nil.”

Birley shook his head. “No, this guy’s a mess. He did something to her.” He was still looking at the dead woman. All of them were, standing around the bed looking at her.

“What about the ligatures?” Palma said, noticing again the woman’s throat, wrists, and ankles. “There’s no evidence of a struggle. A willing victim, maybe. Up to a point.”

“Maybe he’s quick,” Cushing said. “Overpowers them, slaps them down here, and that’s it.”

“Still, there should have been more bruises on her, a scratch at least. There’s got to be something.” She looked over at a dressing table with bottles of perfume, a jewelry case, nail polish. Then she turned back and looked at the dead woman’s swollen face. “Maybe he knew her,” she said.

“What, you think he knew Moser too?” Birley was shaking his head.

“It would account for the lack of disarray, lack of defense wounds, and the condition of her face,” Palma said.

It was a detective’s axiom that when a homicide victim’s face had been brutally attacked, the odds were that the killer had known the victim well, perhaps even had been related. It wasn’t something anyone pretended to understand, but all too often that was the way it played out.

“I don’t know,” Birley said. “Maybe both women were into this.” He raised his chin at the bed. “But I doubt if they wanted to be into it this much.”

“He really bit the shit out of her, didn’t he?” Cushing said, jangling his change again. “Jesus, the guy must’ve really freaked out.”

Palma had noticed that in more than half the bite marks the teeth had actually penetrated the skin, making notched punctures.

“Fine,” she said. “The bastard made a big mistake. We’ll get perfect impressions.” She felt Cushing look at her, and out of the corner of her eye she saw Leeland and Birley exchange looks. She didn’t regret the malice in her voice, and she didn’t care what they thought. Though she was sure she was missing far more than she was understanding, what she could see of the way this man treated his victims told her more about him than if he had given a lecture on the subject. His intelligence, and his loathing for these women, was evident in every move he had made. For Palma, he was beginning to become something more than just another crazy.

No one spoke for a moment, and then Palma said, “Where are they?”

“Huh?” Cushing frowned at her.

“The nipples, the eyelids,” she said.

“Hell,” Birley put his hands in the small of his back and bent to one side and then the other to stretch his aching back muscles. “We didn’t find the one he cut off Moser. We won’t find these either.”

“He’s taking them with him,” she said.

“Probably.”

Suddenly irritated at the cold, she looked at Cushing. “You know what the temperature is in here?”

“He cranked it down all the way.” Cushing was working his gum between his front teeth, stretching it out with his tongue. “I checked it. It’s almost fifty.”

Birley carefully stepped to the bathroom door, keeping to one side, and leaned in, nodding. “Clean as a whistle.” He paused. “She’s got a bidet in here, for Christ’s sake.”

Palma turned and walked out of the bedroom. Cushing followed her. They went a few steps down the hallway to a second bedroom, obviously unused. The closets served as additional storage, the clothes chests were empty, and a second bathroom was furnished with unused soap, unused towels, and an empty medicine cabinet. A guest room without guests. They went back down the hall to the kitchen where Birley and Lee-land were looking around. Birley had carefully opened the refrigerator.

“She wasn’t a gourmet,” he said. “Mostly sandwich stuff in here. Some fruit. Diet-drink stuff.”

Leeland was puttering in the trash.

Palma, with Cushing sticking to her side like a pilot fish, walked through the living room and up a staircase to a study that overlooked the living room. There was a large desk, a sofa, a television, and bookshelves. Outside the study was a balcony that looked over one of the complex’s central courtyards and offered a clear view of a swimming pool with shimmering blue water. But it had privacy, a trellis of wisteria. As they came back through the study, she noticed that the desk was neat, with one corner stacked with promotional materials from Computron. Though there were few rooms, all of them were spacious and well laid out, making the condo seem comfortably large.

They met back in the living room and milled around for a few moments, everyone pursuing, or pretending to pursue, his own thoughts about what they had just seen. Finally Palma got it out in the open.

“Okay,” she said turning to Cushing and crossing her arms, “What’s the deal? Are you going to give it to us?”

Cushing shook his head, “No way.” One hand made a preening sweep down his gray tie as he quick-shrugged his shoulders like a self-satisfied street-corner pimp.

Birley and Leeland looked at each other.

“I didn’t think so,” Palma said.

“We’re going to have to work it together,” Cushing said.

“Together?” Palma smiled. That admission must have cost him some inner peace despite his confident manner. She studied him for a minute as she tried to guess the reason for his fidelity to this particular case. If the victim had been a sore-ridden addict—even though an obvious serial victim—Cushing magnanimously would have seen the efficacy of turning his case over to Palma and Birley. But in this instance, Palma suspected his motivation to hang on to the case was based on a different set of criteria. “What do you want out of this, Cush?”

“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?” He tried to be indignant, but it wasn’t an attitude he carried well. “This’s my job, for Christ’s sake.”

“You know we’re going to want to keep this out of the media, don’t you?”

“The media?” Cushing kept his face straight for a moment, then a slow, skewed grin began to grow, his gum like a plug of pink putty clamped between his bright front teeth. “You’ve already been thinking about the media, Carmen?”

Palma looked at him and cursed the bad luck that had made Cushing and Leeland first out that morning. She knew damn well there wasn’t anything she could do about it, and Cushing knew it too. The best she could do was to seize the initiative and not let Cushing think he was going to be running the investigation. He had to be impressed with the fact that he was coming into the game late, that the ground rules were already established. To Cushing the guy who killed Moser and Samenov was only the ticket to a potentially flashy case that might—if it got really crazy—be good material for a book or TV movie or a film. To Palma he was something else, something she knew she wanted a hell of a lot more than Cushing wanted to be on the cover of People magazine. She wasn’t going to let him take it away from her.

“All right,” she said, glancing at Birley, who was standing with an elbow propped on the kitchen bar enjoying their confrontation as if it were a cockfight. “Since John and I had feared this was a serial killing from the beginning,” she lied, “we’d better tell you how we’ve set up the approach to this whole thing.” She glanced at Birley again, who was keeping a poker face while wondering, she knew, if she could pull this off. “Let’s get Julie in here too.”

Jules LeBrun had finished his solitary video stroll and narration through the rest of the condo and was already bringing his equipment back into the living room before continuing his routine in the bedroom. LeBrun was young, maybe twenty-six, and took his business very seriously. Palma had wondered about his name for a long time; he was clearly Mexican.

She hastily reviewed Sandra Moser’s case of the month before and hit the high spots of their investigation regarding Moser’s background, marital status, their interviews with friends and acquaintances, habits, activities, everything. And she was honest—she had no choice—about the dead end they had come to. The leads in Moser’s case had quickly come to nothing. Now, however, they had a chance to revive the investigation. Beginning with the scene itself.

“The problem,” she said, looking at LeBrun, “is that this guy’s work is immaculate. Whatever his reasons—whether he’s a fetishist, or an ex-con who knows what to clean up and why, or some kind of psycho—he’s not leaving us much to work with. We’ve got to go to extraordinary lengths to gather trace evidence and to keep the scene clean. More than we usually do. There was no semen at the Moser scene, and only Moser’s blood and very little of it since her wounds were postmortem. No saliva. Swabs and smears gave us nothing. We did get fair bite-mark impressions, but we should do better here because they’re more severe.