Mercy Read Online Free PDF Page B

red enamel. Palma noticed that the brass knocker in the center was already dusted with magnetic ferric oxide. The doorknob wouldn’t matter. She pushed open the door and was confronted with a heavy wash of cold air. The place was freezing.
    Two other patrolmen were standing in the living room talking to Wendell Barry, the storklike coroner’s investigator, and Palma spoke to them as she glanced around the light and airy living room with its vaulted ceiling reaching to the second floor. Without hesitating, she passed into a wide corridor and started toward an opened doorway from which she heard the steady, solitary voice of the CSU investigator, Jules LeBrun.
    She approached the door, stepped inside the bedroom, and stopped. Art Cushing and his partner Don Leeland, a quiet, thickset man in his late thirties, stood with their backs to her, blocking her view of most of the bed. She could see only the dead woman’s feet and her head from the neck up, her eyes open. Both men had their hands in their pockets looking at the woman while LeBrun moved around the bed with an audio-video camera, narrating the setting of the body, pointing the camera at the naked woman on the bed as if she were the catatonic starlet of a porno film. The place was as cold as a meat locker. Palma recognized the faint fragrance of cosmetics that hovers in women’s bedrooms.
    Almost simultaneously Cushing and Leeland turned around and saw her. Cushing turned back to the bed, but Lee-land smiled faintly at her from under his thick, brindled mustache and raised his chin at her. No one spoke or moved for a couple of minutes until LeBrun finished recording his narration and went to another room.
    “Hey, Carmen,” Cushing said, turning back to her again, reflexively wiping the corners of his mouth with his thumb and forefinger. He never said hi or hello or whattya say or how’s it goin’, he said hey. He was wearing a baggy gray suit and black shirt with a dove gray tie. Nodding toward the bed as both men moved apart to make room for her, he said, “Take a look.”
    Palma could feel their eyes on her as she approached, and the instant she glimpsed the body she knew why, even before she had gotten close enough to examine it. She knew because of instinct, that indisputable feminine exertion that tugged at her pelvis and pulled at the sides of her eyes. It took all of her self-control not to react, not to let them know she had seen this before, and that it scared her.
    The woman was nude, waxy pale, and only slightly gaseous as she lay in the middle of the bed from which all the covers had been stripped except the bottom sheet. A pillow had been placed under her head, and she had been positioned in a. funereal posture, straight out, legs together, her hands placed one on top of the other just below her lolling breasts. Slightly discolored furrows encircled her wrists where ligatures had been, and encircling her neck was a single, broader furrow punctuated with small reddish welts where the belt holes had been. Her eyes were open. Her blond hair seemed to have been freshly combed, and her battered and bloated face was freshly made up, the cosmetics expertly applied: eye shadow, eye liner, powder, and glistening lip gloss. Her lower abdomen was only now showing the first faint, blue-green discoloration of internal bacterial decomposition. There were a few bruises, seemingly random, scattered over her body and a widespread stippling of bite marks on her breasts and thighs. Palma knew when they spread her legs they would find others on the insides of her thighs and around her vulva. Both nipples were missing, excised with neat, surgical precision, and the quarter-size wounds had turned black from exposure.
    Palma knew what she was looking at, but held her tongue, her thoughts shooting way out on a thin string of probabilities.
    “And…” Cushing said, stepping back carefully to show her a chair not far from the bed. A woman’s clothes were there, fastidiously