Free Mercy by David L Lindsey Page A

from your office had stopped off for drinks.”
    “Right, at Cristof’s. That’s near Greenway Plaza. We do that a lot, to wait out the traffic.”
    “Who was in the group?”
    “The two of us, Marge Simon, Nancy Segal, Linda Mancera.”
    “All of you in separate cars?”
    “Yes…no, Marge and Linda were together.”
    “How often do you do that? Several times a week?”
    “Sure, two or three times a week.”
    “At the same place?”
    “About half the time at Cristof’s. It’s on the way home.”
    “Do you ever meet men there, or date the men you meet there?”
    “Not really.”
    “You don’t?”
    “No.” Kittrie punched a hole in her tissue with a shiny fuchsia fingernail, doubled the tissue, and punched another hole, kneading it roughly.
    “Did Dorothy seem concerned about anything that Thursday? Out of sorts? Anything bothering her?”
    “Nothing, nothing like that. And I’ve thought about it, too. Asked myself if I had noticed anything different.” She ducked her head and shook it. “But this came out of nowhere…I can’t imagine its having anything to do with her. I mean, that it would be related to anything. I just can’t imagine that it would.”
    “Was she planning to go home after she left all of you at the club?”
    “We all were.”
    “She wasn’t going to stop off somewhere, the laundry, the grocery? Had she made any offhand references to something like that?”
    Kittrie shook her head as she ran a hand through her long ginger hair.
    Palma thought of Sandra Moser. The last time she had been seen was by her maid and children as she was leaving home in the evening to go to exercise class. She never arrived. The next time she was seen was when the maid at the Doubletree Hotel on Post Oak went into the room the next morning and found her nude on the bed in the same funereal posture as Samenov.
    “You had an exercise class with Ms. Samenov on Saturday morning. Where was the class?”
    “The Houston Racquet Club,” Kittrie said, and then pulled some more tissues from the box sitting on the coffee table and dabbed at her nose again.
    Sandra Moser had been on her way to Sabrina’s, a tony health club off Woodway in the Tanglewood area not far from Moser’s home. Whatever else Palma might learn of the man who had killed these two women, it was already apparent that he had rarefied tastes. He was working territory that was squarely in the middle of two suburbs whose demographics placed them among the wealthiest in the nation.
    Palma studied Kittrie for a moment. “Do you have any ideas about this?”
    Kittrie’s eyes flinched. “Ideas? Jesus, no,” she said. Her surprise was reflexive, genuine, one of those spontaneous facial reactions that occurred in an unguarded moment and told you more about someone’s relationship to a particular person or situation than two weeks of background investigation could reveal. Kittrie ducked her head again, plying the tissues.
    Palma decided to go to the heart of the issue. “What can you tell me about Ms. Samenov’s sex life?”
    Kittrie jerked her head up and looked at Palma with a mixture of resentment and anxiety. “Jesus Christ. Do you have to do this?” She started crying again, wiping at her cheeks and eyes which already had been washed of their makeup, revealing them to be paler and smaller and less striking than she would have liked. Her unmade face now seemed at odds with her sophisticated hairstyle and assertive clothes. Her vulnerability was now as visible as her unpowdered freckles.
    “The more I know about her, the better chance I have of understanding what happened,” Palma persisted. “She might have been a random victim; she might not have been. I need to be able to put her private life into perspective.”
    “I don’t know anything about it,” Kittrie blurted. “I don’t know who…or…anything. Christ!” She started sobbing uncontrollably and couldn’t talk. She buried her face in her hands and her shoulders shuddered