Mercy by David L Lindsey Page A

carried it around with him as his own personal cross of shame, seeing it, of course, selfishly, as an embarrassing testimony to his own real or imagined sexual inadequacies, proof that she had had to go elsewhere, had had to seek something other than what he could give her. Her secret, and now his secret. Palma understood something of the fragile egos of strong men, that sometimes they had the appearance of stone and the substance of thin glass.
    “We need to photograph and dust this stuff,” she said, and then glimpsed the corner of a manila envelope in the bottom of the drawer. She carefully pinched its corner and pulled it out from under the gear, trying to avoid disturbing it. She opened the envelope and dumped an assortment of photographs onto the floor, black and white, and color, some that appeared to be recent, others perhaps several years older and showing evidence of frequent handling. There were seven photographs which she spread out in front of her.
    In each of the three black and white eight-by-tens, a woman who appeared to be in her late forties posed nude in a variety of pornographic postures with an anatomically correct male mannequin. The mannequin wore a leather S&M mask and held a straight razor in one of its plaster hands, its partially visible phallus an enormous exaggeration which the woman seemed to accommodate with ostentatious anguish. Each photograph was a positional variation. But Palma was not interested. She had already recognized Samenov’s face in the colored pictures.
    Samenov was in each of the four colored photographs, which were four-by-sixes and appeared to have been taken with an inexpensive camera. In the first photograph she was tied to a bed with practically every device in her bureau drawer attached to her or inserted in her, her hair pulled up on top of her head and tied to the headboard of the bed, causing her neck to arch in response to the tension as she strained to turn her grimacing face away from the camera. Her body was covered with red blotches from blows or burns or constrictions recently delivered. The other photographs of her were variations of the same pose—in two of them she was tied facedown—the devices variously and ingeniously applied.
    But something else arrested Palma’s attention. In three of the four colored photographs a second person was partially visible, wearing a black leather hood that masked the face. In the first of these, only the head and part of a shoulder were visible in profile, but so close to the camera that they were slightly blurred and washed out by the flash. In a second picture the same masked head, or one like it, was protruding out from under Samenov’s bed, lifting off the floor to look at her, mouth open, tongue extended, eyes rolling white. This time the image was sharp. In the third photograph, the masked head could be seen sticking up from behind the opposite side of the bed, spewing a mouthful of bright red liquid in an arching stream onto Samenov’s splayed body.
    Was this the reason Vickie Kittrie was so distressed at Palma’s questions about Samenov’s personal life? Did she know of Samenov’s sadomasochism? In light of the pictures and the paraphernalia, it was no longer a mystery as to how Samenov could have been tied up without a struggle.
    But what about Sandra Moser? To imagine her in these circumstances was something else again. Palma immediately thought of Moser’s two children, a daughter in the third grade, a little boy in the first. She thought of Moser’s work in an Episcopalian shelter for the poor and her active membership in the parent groups of her children’s private school. She had supported her husband and his career, dutifully entertained his associates at their home when it was expected of her, chaired fund-raisers for the Chartres Academy’s music program, and sweated herself into a size eight which she maintained by avoiding most of the things she really wanted to eat. In short, it was doubtful