Mercy by David L Lindsey Page B

that any woman could more accurately represent the upper-middle-class, all-American woman than Sandra Moser. And she was a sadomasochist? Palma couldn’t see it, but she knew a few radical feminists who would argue that Moser’s lifestyle, her wholehearted submission to her husband and his career, certainly qualified her as a masochist at least.
    “Damn!” Birley had stepped out of the closet and was looking at the photographs over her shoulder. “This puts a new face on things.”
    After a moment Palma carefully gathered up the photographs and returned them to the envelope, stood, and handed it to him. “We’re going to have to talk to Andrew Moser again. What do you think? You want to bet he hid something like this from us?”
    “No, I wouldn’t touch it.” Birley shook his head and looked at the envelope.
    “But if he was hiding something…” She stopped, lost in thought, staring at the mattress where Dorothy Samenov had lived her strange pleasures and died her strange death.
    Birley nodded. “Yeah, it would be a break. Something to go on.”
    Palma didn’t feel exactly right about it, but some part of her was hoping that upon closer examination Sandra Moser would turn out to be as extreme as the Marquis de Sade.

7
    “S o what did it look like?” Frisch asked. He was standing in the doorway of Palma and Birley’s office with a sheaf of papers in one hand and a pencil in the other. His shirttail was coming out a little in the back and a frail lock of his thinning sandy hair was sagging over his forehead. He had just come from seeing the captain and had walked back into his office when he saw Palma and Birley come into the squad room. Never taking his eyes off them, he had walked around the plate-glass window behind his desk and out the office door. Ignoring the squad room confusion, he followed them around the noisy, narrow aisle that circled the island of cubicles in the center of the homicide division to their office, one of the many small, windowless compartments which lined the walls like computer-equipped monks’ cells in a high-tech monastery.
    “It looked like we’d seen it before,” Palma said, sitting down and pushing off her shoes.
    “I’ll be damned,” Frisch said, and his long face, which always took on the hollow features of a mendicant by the end of the day, registered a respectful surprise. “I didn’t believe him. Cush called in and said he thought he had something like the Moser case you two had caught. Wanted you to come out and look at it.”
    “Well, he’d been doing his homework,” Birley said, “because that’s exactly what he had.”
    “Where is he?” Frisch looked at his watch.
    “Morgue.”
    He looked at Palma. “You got time to tell me about it right now?”
    “Sure,” she said, wishing she had stopped by the women’s room to wash up.
    Frisch stepped outside and grabbed a worn-out typist’s chair that was sitting at an empty desk in the squad room and dragged it into the cubicle. He closed the door, put his papers on the side of Birley’s desk, slipped the pencil behind his ear, and sat down in the wobbly chair.
    As Palma walked him through it, Frisch listened attentively, nodding, interjecting a question occasionally, shaking his head at the description of Samenov’s wounds, frowning at the contents of the bureau drawer. But mostly he just looked at her. He had no habits, not gum or cigarettes or coffee or rock candy, and when he listened to you he didn’t fiddle with anything, sip anything, or doodle on paper with his pencil. He simply listened, no frills or entertaining nervous tics. He was a good lieutenant. He liked his job and liked his men and had a natural talent for managing detectives. He didn’t have any enemies up the ladder or down the ladder and everyone who worked with him felt they could trust both his judgment and his word. He talked straight and didn’t play games. You always knew where you stood with him.
    When Palma finished, Frisch