His thoughts went around and around until they exhausted him and it was time to knock off for the day. He went back inside, slung the Glock in its holster over the chair next to the bed, went in to take a shower. He started warm and soapy just to get the day's sweat off and then gradually cranked the cold and lingered until his bloodstream cooled. He toweled himself off, feeling better, not so oppressed.
He had cut the lights and put a T-shirt over the clock radio and was lying in the pitch-dark bedroom when a small noise registered in his mind. The big house always made ticks and thumps as it cooled down at night, and sometimes there were mice in the walls, little scurryings that came and went. But this was a creak, the whispered complaint of wood as weight came to bear on it. He tilted his head to hear it better and heard nothing for a long moment. He had just convinced himself that he was just jittery when he heard it again, the squeak of boards moving against each other. A floorboard. Immediately the air in the house seemed different: inhabited, watchful.
His eyes still hadn't adapted to the dark. All he could see was the black of the room, obscured by the misty phosphene fizz in his eyeballs. Moving very slowly so as not to make any noise in the bedding, he groped for the chair. The Glock hanging there. His fingers found the nylon webbing of the strap, followed it down to the holster. Which was empty.
"Don't get excited," a voice said.
It was Biedermann. In a flash Mo felt a wave of heat move over him as he realized how stupid he'd been, how he'd let his guard down. How hugely he'd underestimated Biedermann. How stupid to have lingered in the shower for so long, deaf and blind. Someone could have come through the front door with a battering ram, and he'd never have known it.
Biedermann snapped on the ceiling light. The big man stood in the doorway, with Mo's Glock in his two hands. When Mo's eyes adapted, he could see that Biedermann was wearing a dark gray turtleneck, black jeans, black gloves, and an expression of high focus. The guy had steady nerves and knew his way around guns: The steel circle of the barrel wavered none at all from its aim at Mo's left eyeball.
"Sit up," Biedermann ordered.
Mo pulled himself up, trying not to be obvious about his drift to the left side of the bed, where he kept the little Ruger .22 under the edge of the mattress. "How're you going to do it, Biedermann? Try to make it look like suicide? Or are we going to do the puppet thing?"
"We'll see how it goes. Right now we're going to talk." Biedermann took a step closer, into the center of the room, wary as a wildcat.
"Why're you here?"
"You really think I don't monitor my staff better than that? Rebecca going over my calendar on Thursday was pretty obvious. She came back into the conference room looking like she'd seen a ghost, and I know we ain't got 'em in the twenty-fifth-floor restrooms. I also know her well enough to know she didn't think that up herself. Some people are naturally devious. Rebecca isn't one of them."
Mo made a what're you gonna do? gesture and dropped his hands helplessly onto the bed. The left hand he let fall right at the edge of the mattress. Six inches from the other gun. He'd flip off the bed, away from Biedermann. Grab the Ruger as he fell, come around the end shooting.
Biedermann said, "Tell me what you put together. What you think you know."
That was good, Mo was thinking, Biedermann's urge to yammer, to explain. Distract him even an iota, gain just enough time to roll, drop, lunge, fire.
"That you headed a black-ops hit team in Vietnam. That you're a trained, conditioned killer, you were a guinea pig in a secret medical project. That you're doing something here, you're pulling strings to keep doing it, you've positioned yourself perfectly to cover your tracks."
Biedermann's eyes were unreadable. "Jeez, pretty good. At some point I'd like to hear how you came to know all this. But keep going."
Now Mo's hand trailed just over the edge of the mattress, four inches from the gun. Had to roll and make the grab in one movement. "That you're a fucking mutant. Kind of an android, built to kill. That you like to tie people up."
"I do believe you're trying to provoke me!" Biedermann said, astonished and a little amused. "But before we go any further, don't bother with the little Ruger. Because I collected that, too, while you were in the shower. I figured you'd be the kind of guy would keep an extra nearby."
Mo felt the breath go out of him. Suddenly he didn't have a plan. Biedermann was ten feet away, had the guns, was bigger and probably had a lot more hand-to-hand training. Life's a bitch and then you die, Mo thought, part of him just feeling who gives a fuck? The urge to walk, get out, was deeper than just the job, he realized. Just shuffle off the mortal coil, cut every last string, enough bullshit is enough.
"What else, Detective?" Biedermann prodded.
"Why're we bothering with this? Go ahead, do your thing. Or is making me talk part of the thrill, the control thing? Is that it?"
"On the off chance that it's part of the thrill, why don't you go ahead. Tell me why I do all this nasty stuff."
"Because your brain has been altered, and now you're a machine that's just a little broken. You're a good actor, but you're one of the guinea pigs who didn't 'successfully reintegrate' into normal society."
Biedermann shook his head, looking a little insulted. "Rebecca.
Tsk. Jeez, Bee, thanks for your high opinion of me. So you two are getting something going. Good for you both—you slipped that one past me. Jeez, I'm a little jealous. She's quite a gal."
"Let's get this over with. I'm going to get up now, and if you don't shoot me, you'll just have to fight me." Mo moved to the side of the bed, swung his feet over, waiting for Biedermann's shot.
But Biedermann surprised him again. He flipped the Glock around in his hand, tossed it onto the bed. Mo looked at it there, its weight denting the bedding, easily within reach.
"Go ahead," Biedermann said. "You can have it. But we've still got a lot to talk about."
Mo snatched up the gun. Biedermann watched him, then looked behind him and drew Mo's desk chair closer. He sat in it, leaning forward with forearms on his knees.
"I don't usually make late-night visits like this," Biedermann said. "Kind of dangerous with a guy like you. But you've been finding things out and it's time we talked. My office is not the right place to tell all, under the circumstances. You want to hear what's going on? You can point the gun at me for a while, even things up, if it'll make you feel better."
Mo thought about it and decided he didn't need to. He set it down on the bedside table, began to put on some clothes. "Okay. So tell me what's going on."
"What I'm going to tell you has gotta stay secret. I've got two, no, three, choices here, and I'm trying to do the right thing. One choice is to tell you, bring you in, use your smarts. Another is to bust your ass in some way, maybe crank up interest in the Big Willie thing, get you thrown out so your credibility goes to shit and you're out of my hair."
"What's the third choice?"
"Kill you," Biedermann told him. He said it without any anger or pretense, and Mo had to believe it really was an option he'd considered. "Secrecy is kind of important here."
Mo pulled on his pants and a T-shirt and sat on the bed as Biedermann explained. The big house was dark around the one room, the ceiling light oppressive, the air stuffy and congested.
"You're right, I ran some teams in Vietnam and Cambodia. Not much of a secret with all that press last year, is it? You're right—Rebecca's right—it's about an experimental army psych program. The program was intended to make specialized fighting men for particular missions through alterations in their neuropsychological makeup. But I wasn't one of them."
"Who were these guys?"
"Some were convicts who cut a deal to get out in exchange for their participation, most were just draftees. But you don't just take ordinary guys and turn them into human cruise missiles. These were guys whose background suggested they would make good material. The medical boys looked for histories of childhood abuse, violent tendencies, juvenile ar
rest records for crimes like arson or cruelty to animals. Sometimes guys with preexisting neurological conditions that made them, that, uh, disinhibited certain social functions."
Mo felt his anger flare, the monstrosity of the whole thing. "And if they didn't happen to have the right neurological conditions, you created those conditions, you surgically—"
Biedermann held up his hand. "I did nothing of the sort, you dumb shit! Don't you get it? I was the fucking janitorl" He had some heat of his own here, Mo saw. "Who do you think my unit went after in Cambodia? Yeah, we killed Americans. It wasn't any fun, believe me. But the program, the experiment, went blooey. Their neuropsych alterations induced psychoses nobody anticipated. These were guys whose signal was breaking up, you know what I'm saying? Guys who knew how to kill just about anybody anywhere, who weren't afraid to get killed themselves while doing their job, but who were not responding to their controllers anymore. Who were dangerous as hell and could easily turn on their handlers, and also, also, could not be risked in the wild. And, yeah, I admit it, guys who could expose a very unpalatable government secret, one that could affect public opinion about the war. Yeah, it was a big mess, and I was in charge of the goddamned cleanup crew. I still am."
Biedermann's eyes blazed, the most intense and genuine emotion Mo had seen in him. Against his will, Mo felt a pang of sympathy. Biedermann had had a long, lonely, thankless career cleaning up one of his country's nastiest messes. A man who lived in the social equivalent of the in-between land where Carolyn Rappaport had died—a scary, soiled world where a whole society's hideous secrets played out. A world that was all around, always near, but that nobody wanted to admit was there. You couldn't envy the guy.
If what he said was true.
Mo didn't completely trust him, but he couldn't deny that the story did put a lot of the pieces in order: the sudden changes in his appointments, the congressional hearings he spoke at, Zelek the spook sitting in on meetings.
"Zelek—he's part of your . . . cleanup unit?"
Biedermann nodded. "Technically, my boss. Although such distinctions get blurry. Come to think of it, I'd like to get the three of us together sometime, sort this out. Sometime soon."
"So, what, this copycat killer is a, a guinea pig, a cruise missile, who came back, and now his training or conditioning or whatever is catching up with him?"
"Basically, yes. More than half the original subjects were brought back home. They were reconditioned in extensive therapy, they were given every chance to live a normal life—"
"But some of them didn't 'take.' How many?"
"That's classified information."
"How many have you had to . . . 'clean up'?"
"Classified."
"And you knew somehow that Howdy Doody was going to start killing in the New York area. That's why you were transferred out here. How did you know?"
"You're about right, but that's classified, too. I'm bringing you on board, Detective, but you're not security cleared and you're not coming on board all the way. Don't take it personally—even my staff at the Bureau isn't on board all the way. Believe me, you don't want to be. But you can forget about grilling me." Biedermann stood up, flexed his big shoulders. A very fit man for his mid or late fifties, Mo decided, one of those rare specimens. But he looked tired, the dragged-out look around the eyes, a guy with too much on his mind. "And now I gotta go. Big day tomorrow and I'm beat to shit.
This is past my bedtime."
Mo stood with him, some nagging thoughts just below the surface, feeling wary again. "So what am I supposed to do? Now that you've told me this?"
Biedermann made a weary face. "You're supposed to help me out and not start fucking with my operation. You're supposed to let me make use of your talents but not ask for more information or more of a role than I can allow. I had only those three choices tonight, Detective. I couldn't let you start rocking the boat and maybe expose a bunch of stuff that can't, can not, be exposed. So I could kill you or try to fuck you over so you're too busy to hassle me—and believe me, I'd feel completely justified in doing either. Or I could ask for your cooperation. I took the last choice because I'm trying my damnedest not to compound the mistakes that've been made in the past. So help me out here, huh?"
Biedermann turned his back, and Mo followed him into the darkened kitchen. The streetlight glow in the front rooms bled through, giving everything a metallic blue shimmer.
"How the hell do you live like this?" Biedermann said over his shoulder.
"It's a temporary situation."
"I'd fuckin' hope so. A relationship thing, is it?" Biedermann headed out into the empty living room, looked around. "Could be a nice place, though, if you had any furniture." In the hallway, he said, "What's Rebecca say about you living in this mausoleum? You have her over here yet? Elegant, candlelight dinners, all that romantic stuff?"
"That's classified information."
"Funny guy." Biedermann opened the front door.
"You going to give me the Ruger back?"
Biedermann turned to him in the half-lit hallway, a big, dark silhouette with a buzz-cut halo against the doorway. "Ah," he said dismissively, "it's back in there. I just shoved it into the middle of your mattress where you couldn't get it in a hurry."
By the time Biedermann had gone, it was after one o'clock. Mo checked, and he did find the Ruger. His mind was buzzing. Biedermann's explanation had the ring of truth, but there was a big problem, and thinking back he decided the G-man had deliberately shut their discussion down, decided it was time to go, when they'd come too close to it. Okay, so maybe Pinocchio was a former guinea-pig cruise missile that Biedermann's unit knew about and was detailed to catch. But who the hell was Ronald Parker? How did he tie in? And why was the new killer using an identical MO?
Who was Ronald Parker? Rebecca was right, it was time to go take a look at him. Because, one thing for certain, Ronald Parker was no Vietnam vet. If Mo remembered right, the guy was only thirty-one years old. He'd been only five when the Vietnam War ended.
31
MO SAT IN TY'S OFFICE in the Bronx precinct building, feeling frustrated, slowly soaking his clothes with sweat—the building was too old to have central air, and Ty's window conditioner was defunct. He was reviewing Ty's papers on Ronald Parker's Bronx victim, boning up and looking for ideas. It was all routine, files relevant to Parker's forthcoming prosecution, Mo got nothing new out of them. There were more bales of papers in a storage room in the basement, Ty told him, but those were just the usual detritus of any investigation, useless but held pending the trial under Rosario guidelines.
Ty was working at his desk, a dark, angry face bent between toppling stacks of papers. He must have deduced Mo's frustration from his body language. "Not to sound condescending, but maybe it would help if you knew what the hell you were looking for." It was the first time either of them had spoken in over an hour.
"Ahh. I'm fishing." Mo kicked a file drawer shut and sat looking at it resentfully as he tried to roll the kinks out of his shoulders. "Come on, Ty. Tell me you've got something for me. One juicy tidbit."
Ty just looked at him. What the fuck are you talking about?
Mo clarified, "Something that bugs you about this case. An irrelevant detail that won't stop whispering in your ear. Something that doesn't fit."
"I already told you everything about that," Ty said. But then he seemed to think about it, and to Mo's surprise he nodded. "But, okay, yeah, got one more for you. Maybe. On the knots."
Mo perked up at that.
"Back when this first fell in our laps, I looked at the knots pretty closely. I thought they were familiar but unusual enough they might tell us something? One of my guys is good with that shit, had him look 'em up. Turns out they're military knots. Not anything super-unusual, but he found them both in an old army technical manual—should be in the files somewhere. The one's called a cat's-paw, that's the slipknot on the vic's limbs. The other's a running-end bight, lets you tighten up a line from th
e middle. Could mean nothing, but could maybe tell us something useful."
"Right," Mo said. It was true: Ligature knots were a whole forensic science in their own right, could reveal a lot about a killer—background, professional training, state of mind, even left-or right-handedness. He'd glanced at the battered manual in Ty's files, Army Publication TM5-725, published in 1968.
"So one time, I mention it to Biedermann, you know, maybe the military connection is suggestive. He tells me he's got it under control, thanks very much and fuck off. End of discussion."
"So what's the problem?"
"Only that I've never seen any detailed reference to the knots, names or origins, in any of the task force materials. Another thing Biedermann is keeping very to himself, you gotta ask why."
Mo nodded. Again, Ty was right, details of the knots' provenance should have been more prominent in the investigation, Mo hadn't seen written reference to them even in the file he'd snatched from Special Agent Morris that day. He wished he could tell Ty what he knew: The military link made sense in the light of last night's revelations, the army behavioral-mod programs, human cruise missiles. And it made sense that Biedermann would sit hard on the facts here, keep discussion of the knots to a minimum.
The best he could do was nod again, give a shrug, What's a guy gonna do? Ty shrugged, too, The world's full of assholes, and bent back to his work. Mo pulled open the next file drawer.
But after three more hours, he decided he'd had it. He hadn't gotten to the Rosario materials in the basement, but those would have to wait for another day. It was quitting time anyway.
He said good-bye to Ty and walked out blinking into the late-afternoon sunshine and bustle of the Bronx. He had cut across the street and was walking toward his car when a shiny black Chrysler product with federal plates and heavily tinted windows pulled across his path. In the rear side window, emerging out of the dim interior like a fortune in one of those Magic 8 Ball toys, a pale, triangular face right out of Roswell swam into view.