Mercy by David L Lindsey

idea of what might have happened here,” Palma said, looking around. She saw smudges of ferric oxide all over the room, like patches of mold that seemed to be everywhere once you began looking for it. LeBrun had already removed the sheet from the bed and sealed it in a paper bag which he had placed near the door along with a number of other paper packets of various sizes, sealed and labeled. “She really got upset when I asked her if she knew anything about Samenov’s ‘private life.’”
    Birley looked up from his notebook. “Oh? She seem particularly upset about that? You mean her sex life?”
    Palma nodded.
    “That’s interesting,” Birley said, pulling down the corners of his mouth. “Take a look over there in the bottom drawer of her bureau.”
    Palma stepped around the end of the bed, feeling a nagging depression at the sight of the bare mattress and its few sallow stains. No place, no matter how expensive or exclusive, no matter how pure or important its occupants, was free of stains—of one sort or another.
    The scattered bottles of cosmetics and perfume on the top of the chest had been disturbed and darkened with more patches of ferric oxide. LeBrun was thorough. She looked in the small top drawer first and saw that LeBrun had taken samples of the lipstick, the eye shadow, everything that might have gone onto Samenov’s face. Then she bent down to the bottom drawer and pulled it open. There were some sweaters, cotton ones. She lifted them.
    The paraphernalia was diverse, some of it homemade, some of it commercial: soft leather bondage cuffs and keys, panic snaps, a riding crop, nipple clips and clamps, a box of white candles, Tiger Balm, spiky dog-grooming brushes and rakes, a hand dildo and an electric stepped-down low-ampere dildo, enema bag and rubber hose, a straight razor, a variety of weighted nipple rings, K-Y jelly, surgical gloves, a cluttered drawer full of instruments and accessories. She was familiar with all of it from working vice but now, as then, the devices seemed oddly scientific and clinical to her as well as illicit and malign, as if they were the instruments of a death-camp gynecologist.
    Kneeling on one knee in front of the drawer, she stared into it. Secrets. Palma would wager that Samenov had never dreamed that strangers—this morning five or six of them at least—would casually go through her hidden cache of erotica. Sudden death, unexpected death, Palma had learned, had a character of its own. It didn’t come to every man, only the mysteriously chosen, and it arrived with a large measure of irony. It exposed secrets, arcanum arcanorum , as Sister Celeste would have said. In one unexpected instant, sudden death perversely unveiled everything that had been meant to be concealed, hidden things that people jealously guarded with constant vigilance and all the duplicity they could devise. It teaches: you control nothing, not even your own secrets, which at any time can be snatched out of the darkness and thrown into the light like black glitter against the sun.
    She thought of Birley behind her, probably with his head bent to his notebook, but with his eyes cut to one side, watching her.
    “There was nothing like this with Sandra Moser,” she said needlessly.
    “How do we know?”
    The question stunned her. Birley had figured it out in an instant. Naturally they had not gone through Moser’s home as they were doing Samenov’s. She had been killed in a hotel room, and her husband and children were still living in the home. It was true that Andrew Moser hadn’t mentioned anything like this in all the lengthy interviews they had had with him, but then he probably wouldn’t have. Certainly not if he had been involved himself. And probably not even if he hadn’t been involved or even aware, but had discovered something like this while going through his wife’s personal belongings after her death. He was pretty much of a straight arrow; he wouldn’t have told. He would have