Puppets (16 page)

22

T
HEY CAME UP WITH an ID on the first house-to-house, when one of the uniforms had the bad luck to canvass her parents and inadvertently break the news, ass-backward, the worst way. She was Carolyn Rappaport, a student at SUNY-Purchase who had come home yesterday for the second-to-last weekend of school. Her parents had been worried when they hadn't seen her in the evening, but the campus was only a short drive away, she was twenty now and sometimes went out with friends until all hours or even stayed the night at girlfriends' houses, they'd tried to get her to call in but since she'd gone off to school she didn't always. Now they theorized she'd gone jogging late Friday afternoon, and the killer had somehow acquired her on her run.

Mo stayed at the scene until after dark, when the North Castle PD left a car to guard the area but the investigation knocked off for the night. No point in pushing it, nobody had found anything even in daylight. A search of the streambed a quarter of a mile on either side of the culvert turned up no clothes or puppeteer paraphernalia. A variety of footprints at some distance, on the drier banks, but for thirty feet around the culvert there was at least two inches of water, and the mud beneath retained no useful impressions. They'd bagged some beer cans, cigarette butts, a broken pair of sunglasses, even an old toaster, but everybody knew they'd gotten nothing from the scene.

Mo sat wearily in his dark car, the lone North Castle cop a hundred feet behind him, invisible in his own car. The smell of Sunflower perfume was still in Mo's nostrils, connected to some ache inside him. He wondered how Carla was doing. He rolled the window down and looked out over the barely visible landscape. With the darkness had come a cool humidity, rising with the mud stink, and peepers were calling here and there from the marsh. The bushes and sumac trees down in the streambed were nothing but blots of darkness, separate near the road but blending into one continuous curtain of shadow further out. Three quarters of a mile to the southeast, over the dark trees, the interstate droned continuously and gave off an unnatural glow.

Just a nice May night here in the gap, the in-between space, the dying land.

He'd still have been killing her at this hour yesterday, he thought. The two of them would have been together in that lonely dark, playing out that awful, unequal drama on the box end of the stranded culvert. Who could do such a thing? Skip the psychology, that was too awful and anyway too speculative to think about. No—who could, physically, have accomplished it? The killer had to have felt safe here. Had to have known about the culvert somehow, you couldn't see it from the road. Probably had to have known about the rhythms of life around here to avoid being seen, to know screams wouldn't be heard. Had to know how to get in and out of the tricky terrain in darkness.

Abruptly Mo'sears registered the crunch of gravel nearby, footsteps in the dark, and in an instant he was breathless and his Glock had materialized in his hands. And then a flashlight's beam came and went, the North Castle man being considerate and shining it on the ground so as not to blind Mo.

"How's it going, Detective?" the guy asked. "Nice night." He bent to the window, big, square gray uniform, face almost invisible. He noticed the gun in Mo's lap.

"Hey," Mo said. "How about you? You got the all-nighter."

The cop jutted his chin at the Glock."I just did the same thing a few minutes ago. A raccoon or something, I about pissed myself."

They both chuckled, then sobered and stared off at the dark marsh together for a moment. And then they said good-night and the guy crunched back to his car.

Mo sat for another minute, bringing his pulse back down. Jesus, he was getting jumpy. It took him a while to find the line of thought he'd been pursuing. Okay, who could have done such a thing? Unless he was just really desperate and really lucky, it had to be somebody who knew the area, who had been here before.

Did he walk, or drive? Did he wait, or arrive and strike suddenly? Given the short time since O'Connor, had he been watching Carolyn for a while, or was this some impulse thing that he happened to be ready for?

But all the questions seemed to circle around to the other who, the other how—the mental state it took to accomplish this, the mind of the killer. And Mo really needed to skip that tonight. The air was beginning to feel cold. He rolled up the window, started the car, and drove off wondering if maybe this was the dead place Carla had seen in her vision or prophecy or whatever the hell that had been.

The ringing phone jerked him out of sleep. Mo rolled and grabbed the receiver, hands shaking with the sudden acceleration of his heart beat. One-thirty-eight in the morning.

"This is Gus," the flat voice said.

"Gus," Mo said, sitting up, struggling to get brain cells online. "Thanks for calling. Yeah, thanks, I—"

"Got some stuff on your guy Biedermann. You're probably onto something. Guy's got a buttoned-down life. His trail's been swept."

" 'Swept' meaning—"

"Meaning someone has erased chunks of his past. Not everything, but systematic enough to have to've been deliberate. Starts thirty years ago, Biedermann's in the army. Got a Silver Star for some operation in Cambodia, another couple of medals for outstanding service. Records are fine for a while. Then he practically disappears for ten years. But I placed him at a couple nonservice scientific conferences over the years, like this American Psychiatric Council conference on violent psychology, 1970. Another one on neuroleptic pharmacology. In 1972, I got him speaking to a congressional panel on Vietnam, basically part of a scripted Nixon choir on drastic tactical options for what everybody knew was a losing situation in Nam. Subject and contents secret, probably because nuclear options were discussed."

"So he's been affiliated with, what, secret technologies, or—"

"Shows up here and there for the next five years in congressional hearings, intelligences conferences, and some medical conferences for the next five years. Subject not always clear, but I say birds of a feather, so I look at the other personnel at these things and he's

usually on the same bill as some CIA counterintelligence people, some FBI, some Delta people—"

"Delta as in Delta Force?"

"Yeah. Secret army branch, the army's version of a SWAT team. High-tech, radical tactics, cutting-edge science, high-level command structure. Need it lethal, quick, surgical, secret, Delta's supposed to be the tactical tool of choice. Can be used for foreign or domestic, with presidential clearance. But they're fuckups like everything else federal right now. They were there at the Branch Davidian fuckup in Waco."

Gus was quiet briefly, giving Mo a moment to think about it. So Biedermann had had a broader career in law enforcement and intelligence, and it had been kept semisecret—so what? Mo had been approached by the FBI himself, turned them down for various reasons.

"His name shows up in another interesting place," Gus went on. "You remember last year, there was this stuff in
Time
magazine about this special army unit that supposedly went and killed AWOL American GIs in Vietnamese and Cambodian villages? The black-ops guys from back then, the guys who'd done the killing, were talking about it for the first time."

"Yeah, I remember—"

"Then a week later, whole thing blows up,
Time
and CNN back away from the report, all the witnesses go back on their testimony, various army bigwigs come out and say it was bullshit, right? Guess whose name comes up?"

"No kidding."

"Oh, yeah. Biedermann's name had been dropped by a couple of the black-ops vets as being up in the chain of command back then. So then last year when it's sweep-it-under-the-rug time, they call out our boy, decorated veteran and now a successful FBI guy, all aboveboard and trustworthy. Says, yeah, he was in charge of some secret missions, but it wasn't killing our own guys, God no. It was Russians, some Russian spies they were after, that's who the Caucasians were they were shooting and gassing in those villages. It's all right there in
Time
magazine."

"Yeah, I read that." Which would be plausible, Mo thought, except that the whole show of refutation, after the
Time
and CNN pieces came out, was so obviously a cover-up attempt.

Gus apparently had the same thought. He was laughing, or at least that's what Mo thought it was, a series of sharp hisses. "I fought in Nam myself, just a grunt, no heroics, never got even a scratch on me," Gus said acidly. "Personally, I hated the fucking Cong, wanted to kick their asses good, couldn't stomach the whole apology thing after. But you don't gotta be a genius to smell the bullshit on the cover-up. We used to talk about it back then, we all knew what would happen if we fell for some slant girl or lost faith in the war and ran off and went native. Everybody knew there was a unit that'd

come after you and make you dead."

Mo knew from legend that getting that much personal communication from Gus was rare, significant of deep feelings on the subject, at least to the extent that Gus was capable of anything like feelings.

"What about his FBI career?" Mo asked. "Anything on his time in San Diego?"

"Oh, yeah. And here's where it gets funny. In 1983, Biedermann pops out of the service, joins the FBI. Got decorations and prior intelligence work, so he moves up fast, he's going along in Internal Affairs, a nice niche for a former spook, right? Except that in 1995 somebody waves a magic wand over him and he's suddenly turned into SAC in San Diego. Spends a year like that, goes back into TA, then two years ago, bang, he's SAC again, this time in New York. Like he's yanked out: for something specific."

"Like what?"

"Hard to tell. He handled a number of cases out there, probably has quite a handful here. What's relevant, who knows? You were interested in maybe a serial string in San Diego, but there were probably half a dozen, he was involved with down there. Take me a little longer to get details on 'em all."

Going down his list, Gus gave Mo the basics on Beidermann: address in Manhattan, not far from Rebecca's office on the Upper West Side. DOB, car model and registration, Internet service provider. Mo dutifully jotted it all down, wondering how the hell Gus could dig up all this. He had already gotten a lot to think about, but another question occurred to him: "Gus, do you know when he started in New York?"

The machine-gun chatter of a keyboard, and then Gus said, "Okay, yeah—transferred New York field office October '98."

Mo wrote the date in his notebook. "Thanks. Thanks a lot, Gus. So, what about the other guy? Zelek?"

"I was just getting there. There's no Anson Zelek. Doesn't exist. Not in the FBI. Nothing in the FBI's public personnel records or in payroll. And not in CIA either. DIA's harder for me."

Shit,
Mo thought. "Any suggestions?"

"Yeah, I got a suggestion. You're over your head. Rethink your priorities. Get a life." Gus cleared his throat into the phone, an angry, phlegmy gargle. And then the phone went dead.

Mo rolled onto his back and stared at the dimly lit ceiling. The room was pitch-black except for the dull red glow of the numerals on the digital clock radio. The big empty house creaked and shifted stealthily all around him. After a while he groped on the floor until he found his Jockey shorts and draped them over the clock's display. Better.

Jesus,
he was thinking,
how fucked-up is this going to get?
Who the hell was Zelek? Of course, maybe Zelek was peripheral, not important. But who the hell was
Biedermann?
Because there was a big problem with the idea that Mr. Expertise was brought East specifically to go after Howdy Doody. Biedermann came to New York in October '98. And Howdy Doody's first known kill wasn't until January '99.

23

S
UNDAY, AFTER THE NIGHT'S developments, it seemed kind of natural to go do some shooting practice. Just to keep in shape, Mo told himself, always a good idea, nothing at all to do with Biedermann, no.

The Dale Shooting; Center was a private range in New Rochelle, halfway to Manhattan. Mo liked Dale because the equipment was topnotch and the place was open at the odd hours he sometimes felt the need to practice. So he; packed up his two guns, the Glock and the little Ruger .22 that he occasionally wore on his ankle, and went down there.

When he walked into the lobby, he got a surprise that made him think
synchronicity.
Or maybe it was more like
serendipity.
Because at the counter, getting her headphones, was Dr. Rebecca Ingalls.

When she turned to see him, her face lit up. "Mo! What are you doing here?"

"I was going to ask you that."

She showed him a compact Smith & Wesson .38 automatic. "After my, um, unexpected visitor? After my near-death experience with Ronald Parker, I thought I should learn to use one of these. I bought it four months ago and come to shoot about once every two weeks. I'm not very good. Maybe it's a philosophical resistance on my part, I've never been a gun fan. But, gee, I did try to
talk
to the bastard, and I didn't seem to get anywhere, you know?"

He admired her ability to maintain a sense of humor about it. "So why drive up here from New York?"

"Mainly because everybody I asked said this was the best range around—I suppose that's why you're here. But I also thought it would be good to get out of the city. I'd just as soon not risk running into any of my clients or patients and have to explain why I'm here."

They signed in, got headphones and booth assignments, and headed down the corridor to the range area. Rebecca was wearing jeans and running shoes and a short brown leather jacket over a white shirt. He'd never seen her so informally dressed or so pretty, and the way she looked was a blunt hit to the chest. The sum of all longings.

"Is this fate, or what?" she asked. "Running into you. I was thinking of you."

"Oh?"

"Well, I was thinking you and I made a very effective interview team."

"I thought so, too."

"And," she went on, rocking her head side to side as they walked, an effort at nonchalance that wasn't convincing, "I was thinking we should, yeah, face it, have a date. A date that we admit is a date." She had obviously made a commitment to directness in emotional matters, but it wasn't always easy for her. He liked that a lot.

"That'd be good," he told her.

They both clammed up as they came into the range. Not too many shooters today, just two booths in use, the room thumping erratically with their shots. They took stations eleven and twelve, setting out their boxes of ammunition, checking their weapons, loading. She stepped back from her booth and seemed to be having difficulty with her magazine, but he didn't offer to help, figuring it might seem condescending. Instead he put up the Glock and emptied the gun at the man-shaped target, eighteen quick shots. He hit the target return button, and when he looked away, he found her staring at him, round-eyed. He pulled down his headphones and so did she.

"What in the world were you doing?" she asked.

"What do you mean?"

"Shooting so fast. Aren't you supposed to aim?"

But the target gusted up to his station and they both turned to look at it. It was a pretty good cluster, Mo thought, one messy hole obliterating the little X at dead center where maybe eight shots had gone through, and then a scattering within two inches. But two holes were out almost the width of his hand, clear evidence he was not in top shape.

"Jesus," she said, looking over the target. "I didn't know people could actually
do . . .
that. So this is something you do a lot?"

Mo shrugged, not knowing whether she'd consider shooting skill a character asset. "Not really. Just a natural thing. Good distance vision or something."

"Uh-huh," she said skeptically. She looked at the unloaded bullets in her hand, dismayed. "Now I'm embarrassed to shoot."

But she got over it. She finished loading, got ready to fire. He stood back to watch her, realizing it wasn't her shooting stance that he was looking at but the in-curve at her waist, the length of her fine legs as she braced herself and took her two-handed grip. He could tell she was a lousy shot from the way her gun moved around.
Here's
where you're supposed to come up behind her and help her stabilize her arms
and talk into her ear about her form and grip and all that cliche stuff,
he thought, and the idea of being that close to her made his belly warm, his limbs loose. He felt dazzled, irradiated by her, so after emptying another magazine he moved down a booth just to get away from her. She stepped back to look at him quizzically, and he made a gesture at the target track, implying something wrong with the equipment. She nodded and went back to popping away.

Mo shot with the Glock for a while longer, raising the challenge by taking out the numbers on the target rings. Then he shot with the little Ruger, which was not at all as accurate, barrel too short, not really designed for this distance. But still he could feel the rust falling away as his body merged with the weapons and intuited the geometries and velocities and recoil factors. He had been truthful with her, it really was an instinctive thing. But, no, he was not a bad shot.

They had a late lunch together, leaving her car at the range and driving in Mo's to a roadside dairy freeze on the north end of town, with picnic tables along the back end of the parking lot. At the counter they ordered deep-fried everything, burgers and corn dogs and fries and rings, and took the food to a tree-shaded table on the bank of a narrow river. They were on a busy commercial strip, fifty feet away half a dozen kids were bouncing around on the restaurant's

faded-plastic playground equipment, it was nothing like the no-man's-land of last night, but still the river scene brought Mo back there.

Rebecca must have seen something in his face. "We could go somewhere else. I just always liked these places when I was a kid—"

"No. This is fine. I was thinking of something, yesterday—"

"Crime scene?"

"This is so nice, I don't think this is the time to—"

"I'm a psychologist. Spill it, Mo." She nipped an onion ring, holding his eyes.

"You'll hear about it tomorrow. It's the Howdy Doody copycat,"

he admitted gloomily. "Or whatever he is."

She pried it out of him. Grudgingly he told her about Carolyn Rappaport, the obvious deterioration of the copycat's MO, the probability of rape. Neither of them touched the food. Rebecca was a good listener, drawing out his emotional responses to the scene as well as the forensic details. When he was done, he felt cleansed of the shocked confusion that had gripped him since last night. But he'd

acquired the heat of it again, the anger and fear that were growing in him.

"Look," he said, "I need to talk to you about something. Can we talk confidentially?"

"Of course!"

He glanced quickly around at the other customers: a family of four, two tables away, jabbering and munching, oblivious, and some other people over near the playground, too far away to overhear. "I need you to hear this right, not assume I've got weird motives. It's about Erik Biedermann."

For once she didn't object. "Okay."

"I have some information about his past, about his appointment to the New York field office, that bothers me." Mo felt a moment's trepidation, wondering if it was wise to trust her so much so soon, but he plunged on anyway. He told her about Biedermann's role in the black-ops hit squad, his interest in the psychology of violence, his "swept" intelligence background. Rebecca's eyes widened as he talked, and it made him feel better:
She didn't know this. She didn't knowingly sleep with an assassin.
Biedermann
the hit-man.

"He's got a very strange history with the FBI," he concluded. "He gets yanked out of IA and put in charge of murder investigations. Only problem is, at least with Howdy Doody, the murders start
after
he arrives on the scene."

"What are you
saying]"

Mo dropped his voice further. "Biedermann moved to New York in October of '98. The first Howdy Doody murder was committed in January of '99. And that guy Zelek? He's not FBI. He doesn't
exist."

That got to her, and she had to think about it. Finally she said, "Can I ask how you know all this?"

"No."

She took another minute, watching the kids in the playground enclosure. By degrees her sunny face became shadowed by something she saw there. At last she lifted her chin toward the kids. "See how sweet they are? Little wild creatures, innocent, just wanting to play. I prefer to work with children, because I fall for them and they inspire me to do my best work. Also because the basic elements of human psychology are right there, not yet overlaid with the complexity we adults acquire. Little sweet people, unspoiled human nature, right? But watch them for a moment, Mo."

He wondered where she was going with this, but he did as she instructed. There were six kids of different sizes, four girls and two boys, clambering on a boxy jungle gym, scooting down a tube slide, swinging from rings. The youngest was a boy of two or three with a tilting walk, the biggest was a chunky girl of maybe seven. The kids would back up at the ladder to the slide, jostling for position, impatient with each other. The little one struggled on the ladder rungs, nervous about the height, going slow. As Mo watched, the big girl looked quickly over at the chatting parents, then yanked the little kid off the ladder and onto his ass on the ground. She stepped on his hand as she went over him and up the ladder. He screamed and began crying and then threw gravel at her.

"Mom!" she yelled.

"Jimmy!" one of the women called. "No throwing! Jimmy, come here please. Right now. Jimmy, I mean it!"

"Predictable," Rebecca said, turning back to Mo. "Because the fact is we're not nice creatures. Even when we're kids. At our most innocent, we have all kinds of nasty feelings—anger, hate, competitiveness, jealousy, sadistic impulses, vengefulness, you name it. We are full of guile. We hurt others. Look at how a girl that young is already manipulating the situation. And Jimmy—if Jimmy were an adult experiencing an intensity of emotion comparable to what he's

feeling now, he'd probably try to kill her."

Yes, Jimmy was really going to pieces now, a full-tilt tantrum, clawing at the chunky girl as his mother tried to drag him away.

"My point," Rebecca finished sadly, "is that psychology has its scary dimensions."

"You said that before. I still don't know what you mean."

She toyed with a loose strand of hair as if debating something inside. "Can we drive? Just drive around for a while, then you can take me back to my car?" For the first time since he'd met her, Mo saw a deep uncertainty in her face, something like fear.

"What I mean," she said, "is that the study of psychology has gone two ways. I shouldn't be surprised— I mean, what human endeavor hasn't? We invent things that serve to help and heal, and we use those same things to hurt and kill. Metallurgy gives us both guns and surgical tools, chemistry's used for both poisons and medicines. Nuclear science has given us invaluable medical imaging devices and the atomic bomb." She was leaning against the passenger-side door, both to face Mo and, it struck him, to keep some distance between them.

Without thinking about it, he took them onto the Hutchinson Paver Parkway, north. "So you're saying the science of psychology can be used as a weapon, too."

She nodded. "Some of it is common knowledge, of course. There's

the cliche of'brainwashing,' where prisoners of war are isolated and exhausted and their egos systematically broken down, and they're

made to tell secrets by various means. Recently you hear a lot about the science of'creating untenable psychological discomfort'—remember when Noriega was in his compound in Panama, and the U.S. forces broadcast loud rock and roll at him twenty-four hours a day? Or at the Branch Davidian compound, the ATF continuously broadcast the screams of rabbits being slaughtered? To wear them down, confuse and demoralize them. And it works."

"Screaming
rabbits?"
The thought gave Mo the creeps.

"From my doctoral work, I know a little more on the subject than most people. But especially since I've been working on forensic profiling, I've done some . . . odd . . . research and have been called in on some unusual cases. So I've glimpsed . . . the tip of some iceberg. I've encountered at least two of what I'd call
manufactured
personalities.
Where the healing science I study has been used to make lethal weapons."

"What
the fuck
is a 'manufactured personality'?"

She wasn't looking at him anymore, and she wasn't seeing the countryside they drove through, either. "I was called in by state prosecutors on the case of a serial killer out in Oregon. They had caught the murderer, and they wanted my input on his early years to help the prosecution psychologists. There were three of us, two psychologists and a neurologist, and we were all, well, we all became certain this man had been . . . deliberately tampered with."