Puppets (20 page)

The old woman was shaking all over and panting with emotion or exertion. She looked as frail and weightless as an old puppet herself, Mo was afraid she was going to have a heart attack. He looked to Carla with concern, but still no one moved.

"Poor bastard," Mudda Raymon told Mo, puffing. "You give me some dat air now." She flipped her hand at the oxygen tank.

Mo obeyed, opening the valve and letting oxygen hiss into the tube. Mudda Raymon took the mask from him and held it to her face with one clawed hand, breathing greedily and watching him over the edge of the clear plastic. Bent close to her, he could see her eyes clearly, the faint blue film of cataracts in the yellow globes. When he saw the expression there, he almost jumped back. Not fear or cunning or confusion. She was looking at him with utmost compassion. Pity.

He stood back, wanting badly to leave this dark, suffocating place. Part of him wanted to tell her,
Save it, lady.
But another part wanted to plead,
What was it you saw?
Or maybe it was more like,
Help me,
Mudda, I'm all fucked up.

He took a step back from her. "Okay," he said. Mudda Raymon was looking away again, so he turned to the other old woman, who had stopped working, was just watching him. "Thanks. That was good, yeah. I appreciate it." He took out his wallet, feeling as if he were on a stage but had no idea of his lines. "You want me to pay something or what? I mean, I don't know how this works." The woman just watched him with round eyes.

Mudda Raymon made a sound like an old hinge creaking, and she shook her head. "Dis one on de house. Poor bastard."

Mo thanked her again and turned around to leave. Carla walked him down the stairs. They didn't say anything until they got to the bottom and stood in front of the triple-locked door.

"You sure you're okay?" he asked her.

"I was going to ask
you
that," she said, half just tossing it back at him,
Don't patronize me,
and half meaning it.

Out on the stoop, Ty was sitting across from Junior, giving him the dead-eyed look. The guard returned it with his impassive insect sunglasses, but he seemed to have lost conviction.
You only need
sunglassesif you ain't got the look, Junior,
Mo thought. He was glad to be in the open air again.

"How're you two getting along?" Mo asked.

Ty got up and brushed off the seat of his pants. "Swimmingly," he said. Then he added, "Fuck happened to you? You look like hell."

27

W
ITHOUT ANY MAJOR NEW leads and a lot of new players signing on, the task force meeting didn't accomplish much
beyond establishing a basic command structure. It was all Mo could do to pay attention. Instead he found himself staring at Biedermann, as if he could see through the skin of his forehead and into the convolutions of his brain. A "manufactured personality"? A human cruise missile? Impossible to say for sure. There were dark sides to the SAC's personality, true, but there were dark sides to everybody's personality.

The other aspect of the meeting that interested him was the interplay between Flannery and Biedermann: How would these two alphas get along in the same room? But Flannery took the strong, silent approach, not saying much, just asking for clarifications every now and again, taking notes, looking in charge and competent.

The alien, Anson Zelek, wasn't there, but it was a good-size crowd anyway, enough bodies and bustle to camouflage the scheme to look at Biedermann's calendar: Mo and Marsden from the State Police Major Crimes, a guy from the Manhattan DA's office, some New York City and White Plains cops, a couple of Flannery's people, Biedermann and two of his team.

And Rebecca, of course. Rebecca, who excused herself from the conference room for five minutes and came back looking different. She tried to hide it but couldn't resist shooting Mo a look,
Trouble.

They made a point of not leaving together, but rendezvoused at her apartment an hour later. Even though he'd been cleared through the lobby super, when he tapped at her door, he still heard the approach of her footsteps and recognized the pause before the door opened as her looking through the peep to be sure it was him. A woman who wasn't taking chances.

They went to sit in the living room again, which was bathed in a murky daylight from the overcast sky outside. Mo sat at one end of the long couch and Rebecca took the other.

"Okay," she began. "This is pretty bad, Mo."

"First, come over here," he said, making a decision.

"We've got a lot to discuss."

"Come over here." He patted the cushion next to him. Their connection had felt strained ever since he'd proposed she look into Biedermann's whereabouts. Not that he was any expert, but what they were about to discuss was not likely to create what anyone would call a romantic ambience tonight. It was best to try to connect, reaffirm there was something special between them, before they got to it. When she still didn't move, he added sincerely, "If I don't get next to you soon, I'm going to go nuts."

That got to her, a little anyway. She moved within arm's length, but he didn't reach out for her yet. "Okay—" she began.

"Closer," he insisted. "Please." She looked at him dubiously, but sidled nearer. "Whatever else," he told her quietly, "we need to be a team here. We can't trust anybody, we're not sure who to say what to. But we have to start somewhere. So let's make a team, you and me."

She laughed a little, shaking her head. "I like the way you establish priorities. You're completely right. I guess I'm not as accustomed to dangerous situations as you are, I'm not handling this well. But you're right about a team. I like that idea."

She was so close, speaking so softly, that he could hear her heartbeat in her voice. And then she climbed onto his lap, put her arms around his shoulders, put her head next to his so that her hair made a secret golden tent around his face. It was the first time he'd been this close to her and it intoxicated him. The warm scent of her, the weight of her body on his thighs, the suppleness of her waist beneath his palms as he held her lightly. When he shut his eyes, he felt himself tumbling. From here, he'd want to stroke her and explore her and take away their clothes. But she had asked him to be patient. Best to let her lead. And, yeah, they had a lot to talk about.

They did a couple of minutes of team-building and then she got off his lap, told him how it had gone. The plan had been simple, just a starting place. Biedermann's daily activities would have been recorded in a calendar at the unit secretary's desk. And Mo had been right, Rebecca was a familiar figure in the offices, enough that the secretary would trust her, know her, not think anything of her request. As a paid profiling consultant, practically FBI herself, Rebecca's line was simple: "Henrietta, I need to catch up with my billing, but I just realized I haven't kept up with my records since this new puppet guy has come up, I wasn't sure at first if I'd be needed on the new task force. Can I just check Erik's calendar so I can get my own dates and times straight? Just for the last couple of weeks." Henrietta said, "Sure," slid the book over for Rebecca to look at, went back to some paperwork. Sure enough, there were the daily entries showing Erik's appointments and conferences, his visits to crime scenes and other out-of-office times. This calendar was for May only, didn't go as far back as the day Irene Bushnell had disappeared. But it did go back far enough to see where Biedermann had been on the day Daniel O'Connor had been tortured to death, and the day Carolyn Rappaport had died, only six days ago.

"Mo—he took a personal leave day on May thirteenth. His whereabouts are off the book, he could have spent the whole day killing O'Connor." They were side by side now, close enough that he could feel her body shivering.

"What about Friday? We know he was on duty then, we saw him at the power station."

"Yes. But remember, he left not long after you got there? He was talking on his cell phone, said he had to get back to Manhattan?"

Mo remembered well, the big, agile man trotting contemptuously past them up the power-station stairs. "So what was his appointment back in the city?"

"That's just it. He didn't have one. There's nothing in the book. No other appointments that day. From the calendar, you'd think he spent the whole day at the power station."

Shit,
Mo thought.

For a split second, the desire to quit swamped him. Walk away from the job, just walk, forget about Biedermann and all the sad, dead puppets. Take out a loan and go back to school or something. Biedermann's schedule didn't constitute anything like proof, but it sure didn't offer the exculpatory evidence he'd been hoping for. It meant the G-man had the opportunity to have done the killings.

But a question nagged at him: If Biedermann was the killer, who the hell was Ronald Parker?

It was as if Rebecca had read his mind: "I keep thinking I should take another look at Ronald Parker. Because whatever else we
don't
know, we
do
know he was involved. But we didn't think we needed to look that closely at him, psychologically—we
had
the killer, we saw all the standard indications of serial-murder psychopathology, case closed. All anybody wanted was evidence to convict him, him alone. Not to figure out who he was, how he got that way, or what his connection to something . . . larger . . . might have been. And then he gave himself brain damage right away, there wasn't much point-—"

"Okay. So we should visit Ronald Parker. Is he . . . can he talk?"

"Some verbal ability, but very dissociated. We might get something if we ask the right questions. But we can also take a closer medical look. They took brain scans after his attempted suicide, trying to determine the extent of the damage. But nobody looked at the scans for . . . anything else."

Mo didn't ask what else they might look for, that would have to be her department. He was thinking ahead to what he knew how to do, the forensic side of it. Somewhere there was a link between Ronald Parker and the Pinocchio killer and Biedermann, a pattern that connected them. They just hadn't quite seen the whole picture yet.

Rebecca fixed some coffee and they talked for another hour. Mo told her about progress on Irene Bushnell, that maybe her lover had been a cleaning client. The idea that the murderer had a personal involvement with his victim constituted a deviation from the original MO, but as a psychologist Rebecca found it credible, especially given the rape and other features of the Carolyn Rappaport murder. They guy was starting to fall apart.

Rebecca had seemed strengthened by their team-building, but as they talked a crease began to form between her eyebrows. When Mo finished with the details on Irene Bushnell, she had her own news to report. "I did some research myself," she said. "I cruised around on the Web and made calls to a couple of colleagues. It's a little hard to separate sensationalist paranoid material from fact or from reasonable extrapolation. But I know a little more about those government programs I told you about."

Mo had felt better getting back to police work, the solid ground of forensic procedure. Every time they went into the military psychology stuff, he felt the tension come up in him.

"Okay—"

"Everybody knows about MKULTIRA, the army's LSD experiments on servicemen during the 1960s. But not many know the goals of the experiments, or that there were other exotic psych programs. In Lexus I found some articles from the early 1980s, about a handful of lawsuits against the government by former MKUUTRA guinea pigs who claimed they'd gotten lasting brain damage from the experiments. They had been subjected to chemical and conditioning experiments which altered their behavior, in the hopes they'd become fiercer soldiers, better fighters. They all acquired what we now call post-traumatic stress syndrome. Its main neurological manifestation is the hyperactivation of the hippocampus, the fear reflex, which can stay with a person for life."

"So what happened to the lawsuits?"

"They just faded away. I imagine some deal was cut. To show you how bogus the court proceedings were, the government denied anything like that happened—
and cited
national security privilege in denying the plaintiffs access to information. A perfect catch-twenty-two." Mo nodded. Here he was, thirty-nine years old, and only now getting a sense of how deep things were, how much happened behind the scenes and below the surface. Even at the level of city politics, it happened all the time, as Flannery and his maneuverings demonstrated. Imagine what took place at the national and international level. He had no doubt Biedermann's occasional alien visitor, Zelek, was part of some big machinations. But what? The parts didn't fit, the picture just wouldn't come together.

"What else?" he asked.

Rebecca rummaged in her briefcase, took out a handful of printouts, scanned them briefly. "There was another project, called . . . oh, yes, SCOPE. The acronym means Socially Conditioned Operational Performance Enhancement. That's the one I told you about the other day, where they tried to create programmable assassins. One of my colleagues on the West Coast sent away for Freedom of Information Act documents a few years ago. He faxed me what he got—you're welcome to take a look."

She handed Mo a sheaf of papers. Twenty pages had been blacked out in their entirety, even the letterhead was a big blotch of ink at the top of each page. Another thirty pages, apparently censored by someone else, consisted of lines of heavy black marker broken only by the occasional
but
or
and
or
the.

"That's informative," Mo said, handing them back. "Makes you almost think these guys have a sense of humor."

"The admission-denial thing again."

"So how does anybody know anything about these programs?"

"That's where reasonable extrapolation comes in. Every information system leaks. There had to be people who knew about these programs, but who opposed them on ethical grounds. Or who thought to make hay out of whistle-blowing. What happens is their leaks get branded 'paranoid fringe' and discredited. Their info shows up in little publications on obscure presses, homemade newsletters, low-budget Web sites. What gives leaked SCOPE information credibility is that it's all based on real science, real people, real historical events."

"So what was the science?"

"Basically, the experimental subjects were given classical conditioning to enhance certain social responses, augmented by extensive psychiatric work that tailored the pain or reward to the individual subject's past—family relationships, traumas, and so on. Then hypnotic techniques embedded specific programs, like the targeting." Rebecca paused, shuddered, went on, "There are also credible claims of neurosurgical intervention. As we saw in that case in Oregon."

"Brain operations."

"Yes."

Mo thought about it. "Would the resulting . . . psychological profile . . . be consistent with what we're seeing here?"