Mercy (67 page)

“Excuse me,” he said, stopping the officer, laying a hand on his shoulder. He introduced himself. “Anybody inside?”

“One officer, just inside the front door. Officer Saldana over there in the patrol unit with the homeowner was first on the scene.”

Grant nodded. “Listen, I think it’d be a good idea to put that ribbon all the way across the street to the opposite curb. Maybe two car lengths either side of the property. Move your patrol units outside the ribbon, too. It’s likely this guy came and left by car, maybe stopped out here somewhere, maybe raked something out into the street when he got out. Could’ve dropped something along the curb. We want to keep it restricted, keep people from driving all over it until we’ve had time to search it properly,” he said. “Give us plenty of room.”

Immediately other patrol units started arriving and the patrolman and Grant started waving them back away from the front of the house, recruiting another officer to help them enlarge the scene.

Palma walked over to the patrol unit parked behind a car in the driveway. Its doors were open for air, its interior lights making it a lighted bubble in the morning darkness. Palma saw that the officer was a woman and that the woman with her was wearing a nurse’s uniform. She approached the car and motioned for the officer to get out. A stout Chicana, Officer Saldana wore a practical ponytail and had an efficient manner.

She told Palma the woman’s name was Hardeman, gave her occupation and the circumstances surrounding the discovery of the body. She confirmed the fact that Hardeman didn’t know who the victim was, and that the house was locked when she arrived home. She said when she arrived at the scene and saw what it was, she simply got Hardeman out to the car and closed up the house. She didn’t even look to see if the victim had a purse so she could check ID. Palma thanked her as Grant walked up, and the two of them started up the sidewalk to the opened front door where they spoke to the officer guarding the door and went in.

Palma quickly looked around Janice Hardeman’s living room and what she could see of the dining room and kitchen. The windows of the house were thrown open, causing the temperature to be ambient with the cool early morning. Because the air was not being filtered, the humidity enhanced the surrounding odors, the pungent smell of older furniture and the specific redolence of old houses that differs with each one as distinctly as fingerprints.

Hardeman was not an exacting housekeeper, certainly not as organized as the businesslike Dorothy Samenov, nor was she as conscientious about picking up a blouse or slip that she shed as soon as she came in the front door as Bernadine Mello’s maids had been about looking after her casually tossed clothing. The rooms were not sloppy or ill-kept, only comfortably lived in with an apparent I’ll-get-to-it-later lifestyle.

Palma’s stomach was already tightening in anticipation of what she was going to see as she and Grant crossed the hall to the bedroom. She smelled the perfume almost immediately at the bedroom door, and then she saw the pallid body in the same funereal posture she already had seen three times before. By now Grant knew the details of the killer’s techniques by heart, and together they entered the room looking for the familiar telltale mannerisms or any deviations from them.

The bedroom was not large, and the bathroom was not contiguous, but was around the corner in the hall. There was a large closet without doors so that the clothes hung on the racks open to the bedroom. A long, low clothes chest was against one wall across from the foot of the bed, and in the corner between the end of the chest and the wall was the top sheet and bedspread that had been stripped off the bed. On its far side, the bed was relatively close to a row of windows, and an old wooden armchair sat between the bed and the windows. It appeared to serve as a makeshift table for reading material, since it was stacked with magazines and a couple of books. On top of the books and magazines was a neatly folded set of women’s clothes. On the near side of the bed was a bedside stand, a junk store “antique” with a marble top and a compartment below. The little table held a telephone, alarm clock, and a box of tissues.

They both moved to the bed. Grant stood beside her, hands in his pockets, his own thoughts shrouded in a grim frown. Then he broke the silence.

“Sandra Moser was thirty-four. Dorothy Samenov, thirty-eight; Bernadine Mello, forty-two. I thought we had something going there, each woman getting older. But this one,” he really couldn’t tell anything about her face, “from her general physique it looks like she’s twenty-three, twenty-four.”

Palma was beginning to feel strange. The body was vaguely familiar, the build of it, the long legs and even the woman’s groin, the color of her pubes…the color of her pubes…Stunned, Palma jerked her eyes sideways to the woman’s hair. She was not a true blond, for her hair had a sandy, reddish cast to it, the color of ginger.

“My God,” she said, and reflexively put a hand out to touch Grant’s arm, then quickly withdrew it. “Jesus.” She studied the woman’s dollish face and tried to see beneath the makeup, beyond the distortion caused by the swelling, beyond the distracting gape of the lidless eyes. “I think this is Vickie Kittrie,” she said.

“You think?” Grant’s voice was calm.

“I recognize…the hair.” She had almost said “vulva.”

These deaths were spreading their strangeness even into her own life. Could she ever have imagined that she would one day identify another woman by the general nature of her vulva? She remembered—two, three days earlier? Four?—sitting in the tapestried armchair in Helena Saulnier’s house and watching Vickie, willingly naked from the waist down, pluck her own pubic hair, one at a time, from her carefully barbered pubis. She looked at Vickie’s groin now and remembered that, remembered noting the overall effect of that scene, the long, milky thighs that Vickie had to spread slightly to get to the hair on the outer lips of her vagina. Had that incident made more of an impression on her than she wanted to admit? Had she been moved unconsciously by what she had seen, while consciously she had not given it a second thought, had even “forgotten” it? How the hell could she recognize a woman’s groin if it had not made an extraordinary impression on her?

“It’s Vickie,” she said, and her eyes were already taking in the quarter-size wounds where Vickie’s nipples had been and the discolored suck marks that dotted her abdomen and inner thighs like the maculae of typhus, symptoms of a sickness. These were the signs of a singular disease, a fatal virus that never killed its host and never infected its victims. Her eyes quickly had passed over all these wounds and scars, markers of the killer’s mind, and had locked onto Vickie’s navel and the distinctive bite and suck marks that ringed it—and one additional, and grotesque, feature that she had not immediately recognized in her surprise at identifying Kittrie. The navel itself, the inner coil, the snubbed end of what once had been the umbilical tie between the lives of mother and child and through which they had shared genetics and life, past and present and future, was a moist, extruding wound where the killer had sucked out the cicatrix.

From the corner of her eye she was aware of Grant looking over at her, perhaps alerted by her silence, then following her eyes to Kittrie’s stomach. He quickly moved around closer, buttoning his double-breasted coat to keep his tie from getting onto the body when he bent over. He examined the wound where her navel had been, tilting his head this way and that like a curious bird. Palma did not have to examine it so closely; she did not have to see the minute rippled impressions left by the serrated edges of his teeth that she knew lay in the subsurface of the scalded ring of his bite. Those were the fait accompli, and she had already memorized those. What her mind craved were the images she could never have, the sight of him bent over her stomach, the words of their strange foreplay, the sounds of sexual urges gone awry and that had led to an even stranger death. But what she could not witness, she could not avoid imagining. Vickie’s senses, the coppery taste of raw fear, the smells of their sweaty intercourse, sounds of his distorted sexual greed, what she saw him do to her as she strained in disbelief over the top of her breasts, what she felt when he placed his mouth over her navel and bit and sucked with enough rage to eviscerate her.

Grant straightened up, had a second thought, and bent down again and felt the sheet along the edges of the body on both sides.

“It’s still soaking,” he said. “And discolored. He washed her, used a lot of water. There was probably a lot of blood this time. Looking at the wounds, the navel, the nipples, even the eyelids…I think all of these will prove to be antemortem. The breasts are like the head, tremendous vascular density. You cut the head or breasts, and you’re going to shed a lot of blood.” Grant nodded to himself. “He came into his own with this one. He went all the way. Full-blown sexual sadism. She felt everything.”

Palma thought his voice was different somehow, perhaps a little more hushed, more grave.

He stood looking at Vickie, craned his neck forward, and then bent again and brought his face right down to her vulva. Then without saying anything he straightened up again, looked around the room. He went to the closet and got an empty wire coat hanger and returned to the bed, straightening the hooked end of it with his hands. Again he bent over the body and with the straightened wire he very carefully, like a surgeon, reached down between her crotch, fished a moment in her hair, and pulled up the end of a thin white string protruding from her vagina. He laid it on the small pad of hair. “Menstruating,” he said.

He stood back again and shook his head, his eyes still on the body, his jaw muscles working down toward his mustache.

“This isn’t all that much mutilation,” he said. “I’ve seen this small amount before…on single sexual homicides. Usually it’s more, a lot more, especially if it’s a serial killer. It tends to get worse with every victim, complete evisceration, body parts strewn all over the place.” He shook his head, looking at Kittrie. “But this small amount of mutilation—eyelids, nipples—in a serial killer is unexpected. Bite marks, suck marks, even this many, okay. The facial beating, okay. But this small amount of mutilation…and the parts he chose to mutilate…I don’t know. This just isn’t tracking in a way you’d expect. It’s just not a pattern I’ve seen before, in its relative moderation, in its selectivity. They usually want to get inside them, take them apart, look at every little thing. This guy, he’s not showing the kind of curiosity in the female sexual body parts we usually see.”

Palma looked at Grant. His head was tilted slightly as he looked at Vickie on the bed, the coat hanger dangling from his left hand, his right hand thrust back into his pocket, his double-breasted coat still buttoned. Still, she could see that his shirt was terribly wrinkled as if he had slept in it, and it would be clear to anyone that his suit was working on its second day of wrinkles. His posture reflected his consternation, and the dim light of the bedroom accented the shadow of his beard.

They heard sirens and raised voices outside, car and van doors opening and closing. The window curtains on the other side of the bed were flushing blue and cherry, blue and cherry. In the next few minutes the three of them would lose their privacy.

“When we get through with this,” Grant said, “I’d like to run something by you. Just the two of us. This isn’t looking good at all.”

53

A
s the predawn sky lightened to gray, then pearl, Janice Hardeman’s bedroom became the focal point of intense scrutiny. Until she and Grant had had time to work through the scene again and again, Palma would not allow the body to be moved or anyone to enter the small bedroom except Jules LeBrun, who went through his arcane and solitary chores with the studied precision of a
tai chi chuan
master, pausing occasionally to consult with Palma and Grant as to the particulars of their special requests.

Palma watched the color in the room change, as clean, pale daylight overrode jaundiced incandescent and, with the changing light, Vickie’s nude body seemed to evolve from a symbol of mysterious and perverse sexuality to something banal and even tawdry, evoking not excitement, but depression. Palma found herself oddly affected by this transformation, her perceptions unexpectedly recast in much the same way that they are when one sometimes is surprised to hear a perfectly ordinary word in a peculiarly different way, so that it seems altogether new and unfamiliar. The dead woman became
una cosa de muerte
—a thing of death—her father’s term, by which he meant that the human element had disappeared. She was something dead, formerly warm-blooded but otherwise unrecognizable, a pale and gaunt, split-finned thing with a doll’s head slapped onto its gristly, elongated torso, its lidless eyes staring at all that moved and didn’t move with the same mindless detachment.

Palma resisted this mirage of disassociation. Homicide detectives were famous for creating these mirages, a mother becomes a case number, a daughter becomes “the girl in the landfill,” a sister becomes “the coat hanger case,” a wife becomes “the woman in the Dumpster.” But Palma was finding it impossible not to empathize with these victims. For her, the four women were mother, daughter, wife, sister and, try as she might, they could not be depersonalized to the peripheries of her emotions. She was in it up to her heart, and she didn’t want it to be any other way. The woman on the bed became una cosa de muerte only momentarily before she returned to the reality of what she had been and was still.

Like the dead woman in her bed, Hardeman had to give up hair samples from various parts of her body, one of her towels was taken to match with fibers in Kittrie’s mouth, her sheets were taken from the bed, her bedroom floor selectively vacuumed, and the occasional dust balls that she had allowed to drift along the edges of the hardwood floors and accumulate around the legs of the bed and corners of her closet were gathered for microscopic examination, a ridiculous idea in any other context, but which suddenly had accrued to a major element in a grim methodology because of what had happened on her bed within the last twelve hours.