Page 17 of Puppets


  "Who's in charge of the scene?" he asked.

  "That'd be me." A portly, uniformed cop pushing retirement age lifted a hand, and Mo read his nameplate: Officer Bradley.

  "So who found her?"

  Bradley made a gesture as if apologizing for something and consulted a little pocket notebook. "A resident up the road, a Mrs., uh, Mrs. Pilz. She goes jogging with her dog nearby, the dog slips the leash and runs down here, won't come back. So Mrs. Pilz comes to get the dog. Dog must have smelled the body."

  Mo bent to inspect the cords and remembered suddenly that contrary to popular misconception, corpsesdo breathe. Not so they'd fog a mirror, but when you leaned this close, you smelled the gases gusting out of their skin, corruption venting through the pores. Still, he caught a whiff of perfume in the rot smell, a lot like that one Carla used, what was it, Sunflower.

  After a moment he leaned back, feeling like shit, having seen what he expected. The handcuffs were nylon Flex-Cufs, logo right there. The line was serrated trimmer line, the knots were thrice-wrapped double nooses. The extensive abrasion at ligature sites and on elbows and knees told him she'd been used hard before she died. Yes, and the temple wounds.

  He felt a little weak as he stepped back, the proximity of violent death undoing him once more. There was something else that made him shaky, too, a feeling only certain people, certain cops, knew. It was a hatred of whoever did this, a rage that had no outlet and so went around and around in you and made you crazy and sick. It was more than the ugliness of murder, more than the waste of life and youth and beauty, it was the unfairness of one person being singled out to receive so much of someone else's pain. And this puppet thing was the worst, the control and persecution that went on and on and outraged every sensibility about self and self-determination.

  St. Pierre was just standing there ankle deep in muddy water, trying to look professionally detached and not succeeding.

  Mo asked Bradley, "Did Mrs. Pilz recognize her? A neighbor maybe?"

  "Says she didn't get close enough. Didn't want to look."

  Mo knelt to inspect the lower body. Given the cement wall, the puppeteer hadn't put in eyelets but had tied the cords to stubs of rebar emerging from the crumbling top of the box. The knee cords had tightened hard before they'd broken, probably before death, and were still sunk deep in creased flesh. It wasn't supposed to be part of the MO, but the power-station scene and the smeary stains on the concrete floor here were suggestive, so he looked closely between her legs and at her inner thighs.

  Yes, Rebecca, he thought wearily,you're right. Something's gone wrongwith the(
  He stood up again. Bradley was yammering at St. Pierre, but Mo ignored him as he took a turn around the culvert. He wanted to toss his shield down and walk out of here, this was really getting to him. People dying, love dying, Sunflower perfume, traffic noise, mud. May be you couldn't be an effective cop if you had too many of your own existential concerns. Or maybe it was good you were hit like this every time.

  "Mo." A familiar rough voice made him turn back toward the road.

  Marsden was squelching toward him, his suit pants rolled a couple of turns to stay out of the muck, exposing pale ankles. He puffed and wheezed as he came up and surveyed the body and the scene. "Aw,fuck," he gasped. "Aw, fuck." He nodded hello to St. Pierre and Bradley, then stepped up onto the culvert box to peer closely at the corpse.

  "Guy's beginning to fuck up, isn't he?" he asked over his shoulder. "MO is drifting. Hitting once a week, weird environments, ligatures getting sloppy. We got the arrangements of objects?"

  "Not that I've seen yet."

  Marsden nodded. "He can't be procuring with the care Howdy Doody used, either, doesn't take the time."

  "I think she was raped, Frank," Mo told him quietly."Biedermann is looking at rape in the power-station case, too."

  Marsden looked. He was still huffing when he turned back to Mo with eyes that were just black slits, as if he had no eyeballs at all and the cracks beneath his hooded lids revealed just an empty, dead black inside his head. He said,"You know, I'm really beginning to dislike this bastard. You?"

  22

  THEY 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

  SUNDAY, 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 fel
t 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.