"He's not the guy," Mo said.
"I wouldn't think so either. But how well do you really know him? We know our perp's an actor, knows how to look unlikely. Ty was in Vietnam, ran some special missions. Has a police and forensic background. Smart, highly organized. Look at what your . . . what Bee has said about the killer's profile. Alienated, probably no real domestic life. Your buddy Ty got divorced eight years ago, right, never remarried, supposedly lives with his sister. Looks to me like an angry man, and you could make a case that the blond, blue-eyed victimology stems from racial hatreds. Physically strong as a tank, martial arts skills, close to the investigation—"
"You must know who your ex—guinea pigs are," Mo countered. "Zelek said you kept a strict record." His head was spinning, trying to figure if this was real or some ploy on Biedermann's part, another deflection for whatever reason. Ty?
"There're a thousand ways to lose touch with them over twenty-seven years. A thousand ways to fabricate a new identity. Plus, screw Zelek, the fact is the program's records were so decentralized, so compartmentalized, so hush-hush, we can't be totally sure. Let me ask you this: What's your relationship with him like? Real close, or just . . . more professional? See him much on weekends, evenings? Ever meet his girlfriends?"
"Pretty close. Well, we were until—"
"Until about three years ago, I'd bet. Coincidentally, just about the time the Howdy Doody kills began." Biedermann drilled a look at Mo, obviously seeing his confidence fade.
Mo had to admit that much was true. Ty had seemed to push him out right around then. All he could think of to say was "Why are you telling me this? I thought you wanted me out of the big picture."
Biedermann bobbed his head. "Couple reasons. One, he's your buddy. If it turns out we get very serious about him, we can't have you getting protective here, doing him little favors, turning a blind eye. Getting under our feet deliberately or accidentally. Two, I figured you should know. A professional courtesy, I guess. A gesture of respect. We've decided not to mention progress on the handcuffs to the task force, not just yet, it could get back to him. So do me a favor, keep this just between you and me. Right?"
Biedermann blew air out between his lips, looking resigned and unhappy, then slid sideways and stood out of the booth. "I gotta run. Sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings. Not easy to think of an old friend as a killer. Hey, maybe we're wrong, maybe it'll all blow over, huh?" His attempt at being reassuring sounded as bogus as they came. He chucked Mo on the shoulder and left the bar.
39
MO WAS FLAT ON HIS back in bed, the Glock in its holster cradled on his chest, when the phone rang. He groped for it in the dark, knocked it off the night table, found it again. The clock radio said 1:02 A.M. He'd only been asleep for six minutes.
"Gus?" he barked.
"Investigator Morgan Ford?" a woman's voice.
"Yeah."
"This is Sergeant Renee Williams, Troop K headquarters. There's a situation in Briarcliff Manor. We've got an armed standoff in a residential neighborhood, a hostage situation, shots have been fired. The suspect has asked for you personally. Can you get out there soon?"
"Who the hell? I mean, why me?" Mo couldn't imagine who would be desirous of seeing Morgan Ford, personally, at something like this.
"The officers on the scene say it's apparently a marital problem, a triangle? It's at the home of a Dennis Radcliff?" She paused, and when Mo's silence suggested the name didn't ring a bell, she went on, "The suspect hasn't been positively identified yet, but we're presuming he's the owner of a Toyota pickup truck parked on the lawn of the residence. A Byron Bushnell?"
Driving around the Sleepy Hollow Country Club at one-thirty A.M.: big houses and landscaped yards shadowed by heavy summer foliage. Mo drove quickly but without a flasher through the quiet streets. He had come fully awake the instant Sgt. Williams had mentioned Byron Bushnell's name. It meant he'd been right when he thought he saw that flash of understanding in Bushnell's face during their last interview. The grieving husband realizing, yes, his dead wife had been having an affair. Yes, it was with one of her cleaning clients. Yes, it was that rich guy she went to on Monday afternoons, the side income Irene kept secret from Mrs. Ferrara. And maybe the rich guy was the bastard who killed Irene.
Mo had been wondering what to do about his hunch ever since the interview, but now Byron Bushnell had solved that problem for him. Byron had obviously decided he wasn't going to leave this to the police, he'd settle things himself.
Deaver Street was spangled with the strobes of a dozen police cars.
Sawhorses had been erected to close off the block, and Mo had to show his shield to a State Police uniform to get past. Closer, he saw that the cars had trained their spots on the front of a big brick house set back in manicured lawns, lighting the place up like a movie set. Jagged holes gaped in two front windows of the house. Several police snipers crouched behind cars, rifles mounted with fat nightscopes and trained on an open bay in the attached garage, where the tail end of a sports car was visible. A trio of ambulance vans waited down the street, and there were probably twenty other cops in sight, many of them the serious cowboys from the Mobile Response Team. The night air was alive with flashers, headlights, the electric crackle of radios.
Just past the end of the driveway, a bunch of local and State Police brass were conferring soberly, including State Police captain Max Dresden, whom Mo knew slightly. They gestured him over to their conference, and Mo nodded hello.
"So apparently this guy's some good friend of yours," Dresden said.
"Where is he now?"
"Maybe the garage, maybe the house."
"Is the owner of the house inside?"
"We're not sure. At this point, we're presuming he's being held hostage."
Mo craned his head to look over what he could see of the scene from this angle. Through the hedge he could see Byron Bushnell's battered white Toyota, pulled haphazardly onto the lawn.
Dresden filled him in on how it had gone down. Neighbors had called in a report of shots being fired. The Briarcliff police had come, found the suspect on the front lawn, waving a handgun, shooting at the house windows, yelling something about his wife, about murder. When he saw the Briarcliff car, he took a shot at it and blew out a rear side window. The locals called for reinforcements. By the time the State Police had arrived, the suspect had entered the garage and probably the house. He'd fired at them again from the garage door.
They had sent men into the yards on either side and the golf course in back, cutting off any escape, and a hostage/barricaded-subject specialist from Poughkeepsie had gotten on the bullhorn, trying to talk him down. The suspect was obviously drunk and upset and had responded by saying he hated all cops and he'd kill Dennis Radcliff and himself and anyone and everyone else nearby. He'd taken another shot at the hostage specialist. The MRT shooters were afraid to return the fire, given the hostage possibility. After a while Bushnell had apparently begun feeling scared and overwhelmed. He'd cried and raved and eventually had asked for Investigator Morgan Ford.
After he finished, Dresden waited expectantly for Mo to explain. His look suggested he wasn't one of Mo's fans.
"I interviewed him a couple times on a murder case," Mo said. "I didn't realize we had hit it off so well."
"So how do you think we should do it?"
"You've got to call your men down. It's imperative that we get Byron and the other guy, this Dennis Radcliff, alive." Mo tried the name on his tongue: Dennis Radcliff. Very possibly, Pinocchio's real name. At last. If they could take him alive, he'd be the first direct link back to Geppetto. Who was not Ty, not not not, couldn't be.
But the circle of cop brass was still looking at him expectantly, so he went on, "Bushnell is the husband of Irene Bushnell, a murder victim. He's grieving, and he probably believes this Radcliff guy is the one who killed his wife. He may be right. In his current condition, yeah, he's capable of anything. I'll try to talk to him. But whatever he does, do not k
ill him. We got to be clear on this, or I can't help here."
Mo drove the point home with his eyes. You didn't usually give orders to captains, but Dresden barely hesitated before relaying the message to his people.
Mo started toward the house but turned back. "Two more things. When we go in there, we've got to secure the whole house. Touch nothing, consider it all evidence. The garage, the basement, the attic, whatever. Your guys have got to know this, no hotdogging in there. Also, get on the phone, get Bushnell's mother-in-law out here—a Mrs. Drysdale, Tarrytown number. If it doesn't work out with me, maybe she can do something."
Mo walked to the end of the driveway and stood in full view of the house. He could feel the tension rise in the cops around him, the visible ones and ones hidden around the yard. The spotlights stretched his shadow along the driveway, stark and solitary.
"Hey, Byron!" he yelled. "It's Mo Ford."
There was no sound from the house.
"Byron, look at me. I'm putting my gun down right here in the driveway. You see it? I'm not armed."
No answer.
"Hey, Byron, come on. This is the pits, man! We got to get you out of there."
After a minute, he heard a muffled voice from inside: "He killed her! He's the one who killed her!" It wasn't clear if the voice came from the open garage bay or the blown-out house wdndow nearest the garage.
"If he did, I want him as much as you do. We're on the same side here. Can I come in and talk to you?"
A long hesitation. Indecision.
Mo took a few steps. "Is he in there with you right now?"
A clunk of something falling over. Swearing. Then Bushnell's voice, choked with grief and frustration: "No! He's not here!
Fucker's not here!"
A palpable sense of relief gusted through the police army in the street, but all Mo felt was disappointment: no Pinocchio. "Okay. So let me come in, and you can tell me what—"
"They're just gonna kill me, aren't they. Think I don't know how this works? Fucking cops, man, all my life—"
"Nobody's going to kill you. We need you to help us find him. Right? You'll be fine." Mo took a few more measured steps. He was ten paces away from the garage door. He was pretty sure the voice came from there. With somebody as unglued as Bushnell, he knew this could still go either way.
Bushnell didn't answer, just kept up his choked swearing. So Mo kept walking.
When he got to the open garage door, the glare of the spotlights made it hard to see into the shadows. There was the sports car, a Porsche, and to the left a flight of two steps leading to a door into the house. A dark shape crouched behind the open door, gun in hand. From this close, Mo could feel the poor bastard's misery, an aura of suffering.
For a moment they both stood without moving in the light-slashed dark. Finally Mo asked quietly, "You sure he's not in there?"
"Yeah."
"So let's get out of here. First we'll get you out of the hot seat, and then we'll figure out where he is."
"How we gonna go out?"
"You put down your gun. Then we go out together."
"They'll shoot me. Maybe I'll fucking just kill myself. I don't need this shit! This I do not need, man." Crying.
"No one's shooting anybody. You come here, you and me will hold on to each other. But first your gun's got to go. Just leave it on the step. Those guys out there, they see the gun and they'll get nervous. Shoot us both."
More indecision. Mo could hear him breathing and swallowing, the wet sound of someone who's crying and scared to death.
It took a few more minutes of back and forth. Finally Bushnell stepped out from behind the door into the half-light.
"All right," Mo said encouragingly. "You're doing fine." He looked to make sure the gun was on the step, then turned his back to Bushnell. "Come up here, hug me from behind. Put your arms around me from either side, but keep your hands up in front of me so the guys out there don't get worried." Not SOP, but he was sure Bushnell wouldn't come without some shelter. "Okay? Byron, you hearing me?"
Bushnell didn't answer, but Mo felt shaking arms come shyly around his sides. They tottered awkwardly out into the doorway like that. Stood in the spotlights.
"We're coming out!" Mo yelled. The lights blinded him. "The suspect is unarmed! I need confirmation you hear me."
An amplified voice: "Confirmed. We hear you. Snipers are standing down."
They shuffled blindly out toward the street. Mo could feel Bushnell's trembling breathing against his back. He was several inches shorter than Mo, so that his head came against Mo's back like a woman's. The guy was holding on for dear life.
Mo Ford, human life-preserver, he thought. And then they were at the street, and the figures of cops were coming around them, and Byron Bushnell was pried loose from his body. Already men were running toward the house.
"Keep it intact!" he yelled after them. "Keep everything intact! It's a lot bigger than it looks!" He meant the whole scenario. He realized suddenly that he was tension-torqued to the fucking moon, and nothing he was saying would make any sense to them at all.
40
IT WAS JUST AFTER noon Saturday by the time Mo got to Rebecca's apartment. His nervous system was doing a shaky tightrope act between the high of coffee mixed with adrenaline and the exhaustion of thirty anxious hours without sleep. He had stayed through the night at Dennis Radcliffs house, searching through the entire structure along with other investigators and forensic technicians, and he'd spent a half hour in a car talking with Byron Bushnell, learning nothing new. Luckily, neither Biedermann nor Flannery had shown up to complicate things.
At eight in the morning, after thinking it through, Mo had called Flannery on his cell phone. Theoretically, it was to act the part of the dutiful slave at last, keeping the DA informed of developments. But it was also a way of avoiding any appearance that he was suspicious of him. Plus he'd casually asked Flannery where he was, did he want to come to the crime scene, how soon could he get here? Didn't mean anything either way, but there'd been no hesitation or awkwardness as Flannery claimed to be at his Manhattan apartment, yeah, he'd take a peek at the scene but it'd be a couple of hours.
Finally, as a grudging afterthought, he'd thought up a pretext and called Ty at the Bronx apartment he shared with his sister. Sister was there, Ty was not. She didn't know where he was, but she'd take a message.
Whoever was Geppetto, there could be no doubt that Radcliff was Pinocchio. In the garage, they'd found a black duffel bag containing a roll of lawn-trimmer line, nylon handcuffs, extra eyelets. They'd also gotten hair from hairbrushes, which he was sure would eventually match DNA evidence from the Carolyn Rappaport scene.
But Radcliff himself was gone. Which meant no easy link back to Geppetto. For now the best Mo had was a tuft of short blond hair, sticky with blood, that he'd found on the bottom corner of the Porsche's driver's-side door. Mo's gut told him that Dennis Radcliff had been reacquired by Geppetto. They had probably only missed him by a matter of hours.
He called Rebecca reluctantly, this being her day with Rachel, but as it turned out they would be able to meet. Rache and some friends were going to go to a matinee. Rebecca explained ruefully that while moms liked to see their teenage daughters as much as possible, teenage daughters weren't as highly motivated to grab quality time with moms, especially since weekends were also when they could hang out with their friends. The call of the wild, Mo said, sometimes you just had to give them their freedom. Rebecca wasn't all that amused.
Rachel and her friends were leaving the building just as Mo arrived. The three of them trouped across the lobby as he came through the door, Rachel and a Goth-dressed girl and a Hispanic girl, all of them with made-up faces and a conspiratorial flash in their eyes. The shine of anticipation. Hitting the streets, fifteen years old, a little cash in your pocket, Manhattan waiting—Mo remembered the feeling. Rachel saw him and her face changed, guardedness concealing the spark like a shade drawn over a window.
"Hey,"
Mo said.
"Hi," Rachel mumbled. She didn't seem to want some big transaction just now, so Mo didn't slow her down with any other pleasantries. In a second they were past each other. As the girls went out, Mo heard her tell her friends, "He's like my mom's boyfriend." An exasperated tone of voice.
That was okay, Mo decided. Boyfriend was simplifying things, but it was okay.
The thing about seeing her again, first time after sleeping together, a day later, you've built it up in your mind, your hopes, but you're not sure she's in the same place as you are. Leaving her apartment Friday morning after coffee and kisses, there'd been a lot of smiles. But that was kind of morning-after obligatory, didn't necessarily signify reciprocal feelings.
So now you say hello, and you go in and your heart is pounding because being near her is a thrill, and because you're scared to death she's feeling differently. And there's an awkwardness, she's being formal or cautious or something. And you want to respect that, so you're cautious, too, courteous, hesitant. Trying to respect her needs and wishes, not assume too much or take anything for granted.
For a few minutes you're sure the whole thing has gone down the tubes, you're both watching each other with that high alertness and reserve, and then by accident you bump shoulders and something breaks, the wall falls down. Suddenly you're in each other's arms, full contact. It's the best feeling there could be, coming through the wall, better than the first time because now you know it means something. And it's such a relief for both of you, you can't stop, you just give in and the clothes have to come off and you're in bed and you're verifying everything as ifyou were both afraid it had just been a dream, this is real, and there's nothing held back at all.
Some time later, she leaned over him, hair tented around his face, and said, "Hi."
"Hi." They chuckled for no real reason. After another minute, he said, "Listen, you've got to help me get up. I mean it. If I lie here for another minute, I'll pass out."