Anson Zelek.
The window slid down, and the alien's tiny mouth smiled. "Good evening, Detective Ford," he said. "How fortunate to run into you. Do you have a few minutes?"
Somehow Mo wasn't surprised. He didn't bother to ask how they'd known where he was, just took the door as it opened, got in. Zelek offered his hand and Mo shook it reluctantly. A narrow, soft hand without much grip. The car was just slightly stretched, enough to allow a small fold-down desk and a thick Lexan bulkhead between passenger compartment and the driver's seat. Mo glanced at the driver, a big, expressionless guy who didn't turn his head. Zelek didn't say anything to the driver, who must have already gotten his instructions. The electric door locks snicked closed as they pulled out.
"I won't take much of your time," Zelek said. His voice was smooth, a doctor's bedside voice. "Erik Biedermann tells me that you and he had a chat last night. I thought I should follow up."
"Yeah. A'chat.'"
"He says that you and Dr. Ingalls have shown a lot of curiosity and insight about the puppet murders. That he has given you an overview of the real scope of the problem and explained why your cooperation is so very important."
"That's about it, yeah."
Zelek nodded, and the big, almond eyes blinked slowly in acknowledgment. Up close, he looked a little more human, his eyes not really black but dark blue, his skin etched with fine wrinkles, white hair thinning so the gray scalp showed through. Early sixties, Mo guessed. The hands folded calmly on his thigh were wrinkled, too, but clean and deft and perfectly manicured, a surgeon's hands. "What I'd like to do this evening is get to know you a bit myself, and also to deepen your context on the situation—"
"You know," Mo broke in, "it's interesting to meet a guy who doesn't exist. Who doesn't have a past. It's my first time."
Zelek heard the implication, that Mo had looked for his name, and the eyes narrowed slightly. He opened the briefcase on the seat between them and took out a couple of folders, then leaned back against the door and scanned several pages quickly.
"Speaking of pasts," Zelek said, "you have an interesting one. Liberal arts education, interest in history, philosophy, the humanities. A seemingly paradoxical decision to join the State Police. But then, look at this: citations for merit while in uniform, awards for marksmanship-fabulous shooting, I'm very impressed—and as an investigator, several commendations for what looks like great work. But, but: disciplinary problems, difficulty with supervisors, mm, a charge of misfeasance, a couple of suspects killed in the course of investigation resulting in internal reviews and charges currently pending against you. On the personal side, let's see: unmarried, a series of relationships that—"
"I got the point. You did your homework. My life's an open book. What about it?"
Zelek put away the files and paused to look out the window at the tinted landscape of the Bronx. The car had turned north on Third Avenue, traffic moving well for a rush hour, and Mo wondered where they were going. Wherever, it was clearly prearranged.
Zelek turned back, held up a placating hand. "My point is not to criticize you. Erik, now—yes, frankly, Erik looks at this record and sees an unpredictable investigator, a man with a chip on his shoulder and a dubious respect for authority. Perhaps an exposure risk for our mission. But I see something else—I see an intelligent, talented man with too much integrity to put up with niggling bureaucratic impediments, or the . . . ethical compromises. . . the job sometimes requires. One of those rare individuals truly committed to justice and fairness. In other words, the kind of person who can see our current problem in the right light. Who can be counted on to do the right thing."
Mo had to smile at the obviousness of the sales pitch. He leaned back against the comfortable leather seats and crossed his arms behind his head. "I'm finessed as all hell. I take it you're going to tell me what the right thing is?"
The big, serenely remote eyes lingered on Mo's face. "Let me see if I can summarize what you and Dr. Ingalls are feeling. What to do? You've stumbled into something big and complicated and unsavory, you're honest citizens, and your every instinct cries out for some action on your part. But what? No layperson is ever prepared for the levels of intrigue associated with national security issues. You feel at risk yourselves, not knowing whom to trust—as your more-than-casual interest in Erik demonstrates—or whom to tell. How to proceed with your investigation. What channels or mechanisms a citizen can use to do something about a problem like this. Go to the press? Mm, no—not yet, anyway. Go to the authorities? Maybe, but which ones? Civilian, military? Anyway, who'll believe you? And will talking about it put you at risk? If so, of what—just ridicule and lost credibility? Or outright, mm, physical danger?"
"Obviously, you've got all that right. From that, I'd figure, A, you have a background in psychology. Or, B, you've had this conversation before. Or both, right?"
Again Zelek ignored him. "And maybe, just maybe, you've thought, 'Maybe it really is best just to be quiet about this. Maybe my roiling the waters will imperil an important government mission that, ultimately, I agree must proceed.' I sincerely hope that has at least occurred to you."
Mo nodded. It had. Yet another factor contributing to his indecision.
Third met Boston Road, and they continued north through a dense, colorful, funky shopping district. Mo had expected the car to turn back, to circle while they talked.
"Mind if I ask where we're going?" he asked. "I have some plans for later."
Zelek's mouth made a little perfect cherub smile at the bottom of the triangular face. "I appreciate that. I'm pressed for time myself, which is why I thought we could chat as I run one of my weekly errands. Detective Ford, the thing I want to stress is that this is the last one. We've kept a strict . . . accounting . . . I assure you. It has been a long, long haul. But now it's coming to an end—if and when we catch one, final, demented killer. Wouldn't it be nice to close out this rather dark chapter of American history? Mistakes were made, but lessons were learned, and now it's finally coming to an end. What would be the point of making a public issue out of it?"
"So you want me to stay shut up about it. And what else?"
The car continued onto Southern Boulevard, and Mo realized they were passing the lower end of the Bronx Zoo and botanical garden. To Mo's surprise, they turned into a service-access entrance to the zoo complex. The driver rolled down his window and said something to a guard, who opened a gate to let them through. Then they were inside, following a curving lane through the big trees and brick buildings of the zoo. It was after hours, and the grounds were empty except for the occasional zoo staff, walking or driving little green, three-wheeled trucks. The car wound between two buildings, and at the back pulled over among several other cars, huge green Dumpsters, metal utility sheds, and watering troughs and other junk associated with large-animal maintenance.
The driver got out, put on sunglasses, went around to the trunk, opened it. Seeing him now, Mo knew he was not just a chauffeur. Zelek got out his side and bent to insert his face back into the doorway. "This is my Monday-evening ritual. My time is very limited, but I very much wanted to talk with you, and I thought we could converse as we did this. Sort of kill two birds with one stone."
Mo got out. The zoo was an island of comparative stillness encompassed by the vast sound of the metropolis on all sides, a silence broken only by the occasional shriek of some jungle bird. The driver came around the car carrying a big cardboard box, and Zelek led them between a cluster of sheds toward the rear entrance of one of the main buildings. Mo hadn't been to the zoo in a long time, and he'd never been around back, but it clicked for him as they got closer and he caught the smell: the Reptile House. Never his favorite. He'd tended to prefer things with fur and some body heat.
Zelek rang a bell at the side of the door and waited, the smile resting at the bottom of his face. The driver stood with the big box held against his chest. Something rustled inside, fur against cardboard, then the scrape of a claw.
 
; When the door opened, Zelek shook hands with a zoo staffer, a pretty young woman wearing a stained apron over a light blue uniform. They talked briefly, nodding, smiling. The driver gazed at Mo with his sunglasses and hooked his chin at Zelek. "Mr. Belmont is an avid member of the New York Lepidosaurian Society."
"Mr. Belmont," Mo said.
"That's snakes and lizards," the driver explained. A small grin.
But the zoo staffer had moved back inside, and now they all filed into the building. The smell was more powerful back here, a mix of moist concrete, cedar-chip bedding, feces, and the sharp musk of scaly bodies. As the smell hit, whatever was inside the box began scrabbling in earnest.
"Let's have Annette do the honors today, shall we?" Zelek-Belmont called back to the driver. "Detective Ford and I have more to discuss, and I'd like him to have the good view."
They were in a dimly lit hallway that ran the length of the building, with many doorways leading off to either side. Mo realized they were backstage, in the service area behind the cages of the Reptile House. The left-side doors must give access to the cages. On the right were other rooms: storage closets, veterinary surgeries, additional containment rooms with wire cages. The reptile Smell was overpowering, and Mo wanted to say to Annette, What's a nice girl doing in a place like this? But she just gossiped happily with Zelek. A fellow reptile enthusiast.
At the end of the hall, they went through another door and into the public section of the building. It was a carpeted lobby with branching hallways, dimly lit but with tasteful decor and good ventilation. In the huge solarium cage to their right, two massive, torpid crocodiles lay like fallen tree trunks in a shallow pool. Then they turned down a narrower corridor and the driver handed the box over to Annette, who disappeared into another service door. Zejek led them down a row of glass cubicles and finally paused in front of one large cage. The driver took up a position thirty feet farther down, looking suddenly very alert. On duty.
It took Mo a moment to see the snake. Brown and black, irregular diamonds mottled the big body and camouflaged it well against the artificial rocks and dead tree limbs. Then he spotted a second snake in the shadows under an overhang. This one was even larger, thicker in the body than Mo's thigh.
Zelek pointed them out. "Python reticulatus. The largest of the Serpentes. The big one is Samantha, perhaps the largest snake in captivity, twenty-seven feet long and two hundred sixty pounds. I have an affection for the family Boidae, the constrictors. They're expensive to keep up, and the Zoo receives a lot of financial support from our little society. Plus, Annette, bless her soul, is as enamored of the Boidae as I am. Which is why I'm allowed to help out with their feedings."
The snakes weren't moving. They could have been fake, made out of the same plaster as the rocks. A quality of stillness only a cold-blooded animal can manage, Mo thought.
"But I didn't answer your question," Zelek went on. He continued staring into the cage as if he couldn't take his eyes off the snakes. "What do we want you to do? Well, just what Erik told you. Help us with the forensic end of it, by all means continue your excellent work, but don't go chasing after big game. The proper authorities—that is myself, Erik, and our team—are fully informed. You and Dr. Ingalls can rest your consciences on that score."
From behind the cage came an echoing metallic clank. The big pythons didn't budge, but in the next cage to the right a smaller snake began to ooze slowly along a dead tree limb.
Zelek noticed, too, and said, "That's our friend Python boeleni. Also a fine specimen. He's smart—he knows it's his feeding time, too."
Another series of metallic sounds from backstage, and now there was activity in many of the cages, silent glidings and shiftings. Zelek acknowledged the huge mud-brown snake to their left: "But it's not anaconda's turn. That's next week."
"What about," Mo said, "when we come up with things that don't make sense? Or that we don't know whether you're onto them or not?"
"They don't feed very often," Zelek explained. He raised his chin to point out the hatch that had opened at the top of the python cage. A metal basket appeared in the opening, with a pair of plump white rabbits moving fitfully inside. "Only about once every two weeks. Reticulata have slow metabolisms, and though they do crush the skeletons fairly well before ingesting, they eat their prey whole. So they take a long time to digest their dinner." Zelek had been watching the rabbits descend with keen appreciation in his alien eyes. "To answer your question, all you have to do is come to Erik with any inquiries or concerns. Not to anyone else, please, you'll only jeopardize our mission. But, again, that said, I hope you and Dr. Ingalls will leave the big picture to us. We're very familiar with it. We're almost done. The last one, Detective! Let it be."
Mo thought about it. "And if we don't?"
"They're always fed after hours," Zelek continued, "because the general public . . . well, it offends some people. Children in particular tend to get upset. Not good for the zoo's public relations or fund-raising for the Lepidosaura." Zelek laughed at his own understatement, a small, warm chuckle. "But it's just nature. It's the larger design of things, ancient, beautiful in its symmetry. It's just the food chain."
The rabbits got dumped as the cage neared the fake-rock floor of the cage, and they stood uncertainly near each other, sniffing and staring with round, pink eyes. Just pet store bunnies probably left over from the Easter sales season. They looked afraid to budge. Mo was thinking, Their genes know the scent of the ancient enemy.
And then first one and then the other python began to move, just a lateral tick of the big heads at first, and then the slowest of slow adjustments of head and body. And then the hypnotizingly slow pour of the checkered bodies along the contours of the rocks. Straightening out of her coils, the big one was unbelievably long. The rabbits began leaping against the side of the cage, against the glass, up the rocks, in and out of the pool, up the glass again. Scrabbling, falling, leaping again.
"My point," Zelek said, "is just that you have done fine work, the proper authorities are in charge. I know this whole affair is probably upsetting to you and Dr. Ingalls. But I hope that after our talk today, you can put your minds at ease." He watched the cage with satisfaction for another moment, then said, "Their slow movements are actually quite deceptive. When they need to be, they're lightning quick. Once they scent their prey, it's all over quite fast."
32
ON TUESDAY MORNING, Rebecca called to thank Mo for the evening of bowling and to say she'd been able to arrange access to Ronald Parker on Thursday at the psychiatric facility at Rikers Island. That was good, because the rest of the case appeared to be flatlining. He and St. Pierre hadn't come up with any useful leads on Irene Bushnell's possible lover and had started to look to the other murders for progress. But there wasn't any. Carolyn Rappaport had been killed by somebody who left no trace of himself other than his genetic material, useful for convicting but not for locating him. The O'Connor case had even less going for it.
After work, Mo thought about maybe going in to see Rebecca but then felt too out of control, too fucked-up. He was still processing the events of the last few days. Biedermann's revelation that he was the cleanup man, not the killer, had at first calmed his immediate fears. But then the session with Zelek, that was a real picnic. The alien hadn't uttered a single threatening word. But the image of the rabbits being crushed in the relentless coils, and then the endlessly stretching snake mouths—that was going to stay with him for a while. Mo didn't know which chilled him more, the idea that Zelek had deliberately scripted the scene or that the guy was truly oblivious to how grotesque it had been.
The visit to Mudda Raymon had stayed with him, too, disturbing him to the extent that he almost wanted to go back there and grill Carla about what she had told the old woman. Maybe even have another session with the mudda. But that was getting superstitious, losing his objectivity.
Bottom line, he didn't want Rebecca to see him like this, shaky and off-balance. Not until they knew each other
better, not until whatever they were doing was stronger.
On the way home he stopped at a Burger King on the strip and sat in his hot car, stuffing down a Whopper as he watched the seagulls wheeling over the parking lots, flashing brilliant pink-orange in the light of the lowering sun. He stared suspiciously at the drivers of every car that came through the lot. Any one of them could be the killer, Mo might have seen him every day for years. That was the thing about serial killers, their ongoing secret presence among ordinary people. The masquerade. Ponder that one too much, it could bring you down.
Without thinking about what he was going to do, he got out and walked across the parking lot through the stink of the drive-in's Dumpsters. At a discount shoe store, he bought a pair of calf-length rubber boots, then got back to the car and drove seven miles to the swamp where Carolyn Rappaport had died.
It was just sunset by the time he'd parked and pulled on the boots, but he knew the sky would stay bright for a while. Enough light to navigate by. He headed down into the marshy streambed.
The extensive dimpling of the mud under the water told him that Biedermann had had crews out here since last week. He wondered if the SAC had done something high-tech, like flying over the scene with a helicopter and computer-controlled scanning cameras and who knew what else.
He knew there was nothing physical for him to find here now. He was really after the atmosphere, the sorrowful ghost of the place. The reverberations of the awful things that had happened here. When you had a lot perking just below your conscious thoughts, the ambience of the crime scene could guide the flow of your intuition. Hidden details and half-formed ideas sometimes came forward. He squelched upstream, into the thin forest of stunted sumacs, trying to visualize the place as it had been eleven nights ago.