Mudda Raymon sat in a Barcalounger in front of the television. She was a tiny old lady, skeletally thin, with a fog of white hair around her narrow, mottled skull. She wore a flowery quilted robe from which her corded neck and wrists emerged like dried twigs, and she didn't look up as they came in, just watched the credits passing on the big screen. An oxygen tank on a wheeled cart stood next to her chair along with a hospital tray table that held a glass of water, the television remote, eyeglasses, a box of Kleenex, an ashtray full of cigarette butts.
"Mudda, this the policeman of Carla," the young woman said. Mudda Raymon didn't move or say anything, just watched the credits flowing up the screen, her lips drawn back in a toothless smile.
They waited like this for a full minute. As his eyes adapted to the dim light, Mo saw that there were other people in the room: an old gentleman in a three-piece suit, apparently asleep in another chair, and a tall teenage boy and another older woman who were sorting seeds or beads at a little table. Another bodyguard type, big and alert, in a chair near the back wall. A half-closed side door led to a well-lit kitchen, from which Mo could hear the sounds of dishes, murmured voices, a baby crying.
The film ended and the screen went into a haze of static and then flipped bright flat blue, the blank screen of the video. Still the old woman stared at it.
"Okay," Mo said finally, his voice loud in the muffled air. "This is great. Now where's Carla Salerno?" He had given up on the old woman and directed his scowl at the others.
But there was Carla, coming out of the kitchen, carrying a tray. She looked at Mo with disapproval as she passed him to set the tray on the table next to Mudda Raymon. A smell of jerk spice wafted in with her.
"Hey, Carla," Mo said. She was wearing a kitchen apron over jeans and a halter top, and suddenly he felt stupid with his mission to rescue her from the voodoo infidels on the basis of Detta's neurotic, racist worry. For all that it was dark and stuffy in here, it was a pretty ordinary room, no sign of dead goats or bowls of blood, a lot cleaner and more together than his own rooms. Then he saw the way Carla's hand shook as she set a spoon in the bowl. And he thought, yeah, maybe this was bad for her, maybe she was tangled in something here, maybe she wasn't quite all right. She seemed to have taken a role as some kind of nurse or servant for the old woman.
"Mudda, do you want to eat now?" Carla asked.
For the first time, Mudda Raymon moved. Her little head shook decisively twice. "No. Talk to policeman now." Her voice was surprisingly deep, almost a man's voice. She turned to face Mo more directly, beckoned him with a flip of her mummy's hand. "Come 'ere, boy. Come on, don' be 'fraid ol' mudda-woman." When Mo didn't move immediately, she went on, "You be 'fraid of me? Huh?" The thought made her laugh. "Shit," she said. "Big man 'fraid of everyt'ing. Shit." She snorted derisively and turned back to stare at the blue screen. Her eyes were lightly cataracted with blue-white veils that reflected the cathode light.
Across the room, Mo noticed, the nattily dressed old man had opened his eyes and was watching them intently. He hadn't stirred, his chin was still on his chest, but his eyes were sparking in the blue glow. Since the old woman had begun speaking, everybody seemed very alert, very focused.
"Mudda Raymon," Mo began, "I don't want to bother you. I just—"
"Dis differn't kind o' church, huh," Mudda said disinterestedly. "Dis not Jew synagogue, not Mother Mary church, you half-half bastard. You don't know dis church. Big man, 'fraid everyt'ing, shit. Oh, you 'fraid inside your head, you 'fraid of black-old Mudda, you 'fraid yourself. You 'fraid to be 'lone, 'fraid bad man eat the world up, what else." She shook her head and clacked her tongue in disdain.
"Mo," Carla said quietly, "I've told Mudda Raymon about you, and she would like to give you a session. You should know, it's quite an honor, Mo, she's a very . . . special person. I think you should listen."
"I appreciate the offer," Mo said, "but I didn't come here for that.
Your mother called me, she was worried about you, I promised her I'd check up on you. Tell me you're all right and I'll go."
Even in the dim light, Mo could see Carla's anger flare. "God damn Detta! So you come down here like a good little Boy Scout, embarrassing me, insulting these people, barging in—what, is this something you cooked up to—"
Mo knew she was going to say something like to try to get me back. But she was interrupted by a sudden roar of static from the television. Mudda Raymon had found the remote on the tray table and thumbed it, and the screen flashed from blue to a field of fine rainbow-gray static. Mudda Raymon adjusted the noise level, watching the volume tracker on the screen. When the sound had subsided, she put down the remote and half-turned to Mo.
"I like de TV," Mudda Raymon said conversationally. "You like to watch de TV? Got good shows?"
Mo hesitated, then answered, "Once in a while."
"See, dis show." Mudda Raymon leaned forward, reached a gnarled finger toward the screen. She traced a shape in the snowstorm of static. '"Bout a man, he got trouble. You see him dere?"
She was crazy, Mo was thinking. Somehow all these gullible, desperate, superstitious people had granted her some kind of mystical authority, and here she was just a shrunken, senile, old mummy. But despite himself he followed her finger, and, yes, there were larger moving shapes in the static, as if the TV were one channel off the station and picking up just a ghost of some show. Maybe people moving in a room or trees tossing in a storm. Or no, maybe boxing or pro wrestling.
"See, he got all kinds trouble." Mudda Raymon's blue-white eyes were locked wide on the screen. "Look, he fight, now he fight himself, now he fight 'nother man. Now he fight big giant man, he kill big giant man. Now he fight himself again, always fighting. You see him now? You know him?"
So we're getting a session whether we like it or not, Mo realized. He wondered why Carla had told the old woman so much about him, even to the Big Willie thing. On the screen, phantom shapes swam in the static, vehement ghosts, whirlwinds in a sandstorm.
"All de deads," she droned on. "He have so many deads. See dere? An' de deads hurt his heart, make his heart sick. Make him always 'fraid, make him sad like he gon' die. Poor man, first he t'ink he can fix de bad men. But bad men like a river, no end, bad men like de ocean. So he t'ink, all men bad men, nobody no good, he heartsick. Oh! An' now he got new trouble."
Mudda Raymon shook her head and laughed, her eyebrows going up on her forehead in delighted surprise, as if she really were watching a TV sitcom or family drama. Mo started to say something to cut this off but then stopped. She was quite a show, no doubt about it, might as well see it through to its end.
Mudda Raymon's brows came down, and she leaned toward the screen with a little more urgency. Her milky eyes never wavered from the static snowstorm, but she looked dismayed now, her head shaking on its stalk of neck. "Now, dis part bad. Oh, yah, de puppets! De dancing puppets. Everybody damn' puppet. Poor bastard."
Mo felt the skin contract on the back of his neck. Carla had come up with something like puppets in her vision, too, and he could swear he'd never told her a word about those cases. The heat of the room was insufferable, how did these people stand it?
The deep voice rasped on in its monotone: "And dere de dump-yard, dat bad. De old dump-yard. Oh, and dis—dis so bad. See! De puppet-puppetl See de puppet-puppet, de bones puppet-puppet." She leaned back now, pulling away from whatever she saw in the haze of static. "You got to watch him. He watch you. He come get you! De puppet-puppet gon' come get you! Dis so bad! Okay, no more dis, no more." Suddenly Mudda Raymon was groping on the tray table for the remote, and she knocked the water glass onto the floor. The crash of breaking glass startled everyone in the room. Even the old man snapped his head off his chest. Then Mudda Raymon found the box and the screen went black.
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
WITHOUT 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 bac
k 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."