She heard the seriousness in his voice, time to get to business, and reluctantly prodded him out of bed. Once he was upright, she pushed him into the bathroom and started the shower for him. When he came out, she was waiting with a mug of fresh coffee. He drank it scalding hot, using the burn to help wake up.
They got dressed and sat in the living room as he brought her up to date: Byron Bushnell and the scene at Dennis Radcliffs house last night, his belief that Geppetto had reacquired Radcliff.
"It was inevitable," she said. "As a test subject, Pinocchio was falling apart. Geppetto is highly organized, he's got an agenda that shapes his actions just as much as his compulsions do. Radcliff was making too many mistakes. Exposing Geppetto in too many ways."
"Question is, what does he do with Radcliff now?"
"Most likely attempts to refresh his conditioning—reprograms him. Geppetto would be disinclined to waste the time and energy he's invested in him."
"So what's the new program? Just more random kills?"
She didn't answer, but her face told him: No, no more random kills. That wasn't working with Radcliff. Geppetto would use Radcliff strategically, target him to protect his agenda. As he had sent Parker after Rebecca.
"So the question is, who'll be the target?" he asked.
"Does Geppetto have any way of knowing . . . you and I are onto him?" The thought brought fear into her face: She knew too well how it felt to be targeted.
Mo had pondered that, trying to let reason prevail, to get Mudda Raymon's voice out of his head: De puppet-puppet gon' come after you.
"I don't think so. No more than any other principals in the case—Biedermann, or some of his people, or even Mike St. Pierre, or . . ." He petered out, remembering the other development in his thinking of the last twenty-four hours.
"What just happened? Tell me, Mo." Seeing it in his face.
So he told her about meeting Biedermann at the bar, the handcuffs implicating Ty. Then about Flannery, his suggestive background, the way he was manipulating Mo, the way he seemed to know everything Mo did, keeping tabs on him. The right physical type, a number of matches to the emerging psychological profile of Geppetto. The way he'd steered Mo's suspicion to Biedermann. Rebecca listened carefully, no longer so skeptical of Mo's hunches.
"But you're not buying Biedermann's suspicions about Ty."
"I can't see it. I just. . . can't." Can't or won't? he asked himself. He wished he felt as certain as his words implied. "Especially not when Flannery is starting to look so likely. I know the material I have on him is completely circumstantial. But I've got a few lines of inquiry out, I should know more in a few days."
"I think you should tell Erik. At least ask him if he's ever considered Flannery."
Mo tipped his head, ambivalent.
"We either trust him or we don't, Mo! Which is it?"
"Not that simple. The more we know about this, the more Biedermann and his 'cleanup crew' have to worry about us.. I trust Biedermann to fulfill his brief. I just don't know how far his brief goes."
She didn't agree. They argued about it for a time, ending with a decision to wait a little longer on talking to Biedermann about Flannery.
Then it was her turn. "Let me catch you up on what I've been doing. First, I've been building the profile of Geppetto. The tapes of Ronald Parker's talking to himself in his cell have been a big help. As you heard, he has two primary affective modes, two main 'voices' in his speech. One is rambling, disorganized, dissociated. The other is the lecturing voice, the rote statements and slogans, which I see as an artifact of a conditioning process. From that content I can draw a bead on Geppetto's agenda."
"Which is—?"
Rebecca went to her desk, found a sheaf of notes, flipped through the pages. "I think Geppetto sees himself as a warrior, a guerrilla. His puppet-making is part of a mission that he feels is morally defensible. His actions are statements, almost acts of protest. He casts himself and his puppets and their victims as martyrs to a higher cause, because society doesn't acknowledge him. He feels persecuted and outcast."
"That part's pretty typical, with serial killers."
"True. But in his case, the delusion seems to have an unusually powerful internal consistency."
"So what's his statement? What's he protesting?"
She shrugged, and her brows made graceful question marks.
"Don't know. Something as simple as his own childhood trauma? Something as complex as some social or political injustice, real or perceived? Whichever, we know it centers on control." For a moment she looked defeated by the mystery, but then she rallied. "I need to go over the tapes again and do some more reading in the medical literature. But," she went on, "I also got a lot from Parker's other voice—his ramblings. I performed a quantitative analysis."
"What's that?"
"In one sense, it's a crude tool, but it can often be very helpful. Basically, you inventory what the patient says when he free-associates. The basic idea is simply that themes that show up frequently are probably significant."
"So what themes cropped up?"
" 'Daddy' is a big one, we saw that right away. In fact, records show Parker was physically abused—violent, not sexual—by his father, but in this case I doubt the daddy theme is directly left over from childhood trauma at his father's hands. I think Geppetto deliberately acted the daddy role, exploited it, to anchor Parker's programming in his childhood. Tie in to archetypes of fear and authority residual from infancy. It's smart conditioning."
"Does that mean Geppetto knew something about Parker's past—knew he'd been abused?"
"If he did, it would suggest that he either knew Parker personally or did background research as part of his procurement process. Parker has a record with social welfare agencies, the juvenile-detention and foster-care systems—Geppetto could have found that out, chosen him on the basis of his past. But not necessarily. Unfortunately, daddies are all too often . . . frightening, authoritarian, controlling figures. Geppetto could just be exploiting that generality."
Mo thought about that, took out his pad and noted it. That was good: Geppetto's procurement techniques could leave a trail back to him. "What else?"
"Let's see. Well, there were a couple of odd ones. 'Dogs' came up a lot. 'Like the dogs.' 'Where the dogs go when they're bad.' Not sure what to make of that . . . Then there's 'the junkyard,' or 'the dump.' It's connected with both punishment and reward. Comes up again and again."
A chill shimmied up Mo's spine. Mudda Raymon said something about a "dump-yard." "Is the junkyard a . . . a real place? Or a symbolic place?"
She did an admiring double take. "God, I love the way you catch these things! I'm not sure. Symbolically, it sounds threatening—a dump is ugly, a place where broken or unneeded things are discarded. If Parker was a 'thing,' maybe 'Daddy' threatened to throw him away if he didn't behave? But I got the sense it might be a real environment. 'Don't make me go to the dump.' 'Daddy loves me, I did good in the junkyard.'"
"So it could be a real place."
"Sure. But not necessarily a real junkyard. Could be a real place that Geppetto gave a symbolically meaningful name. But I have a theory." This was dark stuff, but Rebecca was looking pleased with herself. The bloodhound look. Mo shook his head, amazed at her.
She was getting into it now, pacing and gesturing as she explained, "I thought about how you would conduct conditioning on human beings. Geppetto required about twenty months for each subject, right? We figured that from the time elapsed between when Ronald Parker went missing and his first kill, and it strikes me as about right for the minimum time needed to establish solid conditioning. Okay. You'd have to have a private, secure place, to do this stuff. It would be someplace where you could come and go without attracting anyone's attention—maybe a rural location. It'd have to be a place where people couldn't see or hear anything, so it'd be inside, maybe a basement or attic. But if you wanted to create killers who could stay stable in the real world, keep a semblance of normalc
y as they went about the killing, you couldn't just turn them loose afterward. Not after twenty months in some dark hole, probably strung up like a puppet a lot of the time. They'd be severely agoraphobic when they first got outside again—cripplingly afraid of open spaces. They might not be in good physical shape. You'd have to acclimate them to the outdoors again by degrees, and you'd want them to get strong. Most important, you'd want to exercise the programming in situations where the subject wasn't under direct physical control. Geppetto would have to be sure his subjects could experience physical freedom and yet still obey commands and implanted compulsions. Parker's remarks are very fragmentary, but I think the dump is where Geppetto took him when he was almost ready to be set loose. The final stage of conditioning. Very strenuous, very scary, yet liberating, too. The site of the most extreme punishments and most extreme rewards."
When Rebecca got into this stuff, she really hummed. She was strikingly beautiful now, animated, eyes alight, and Mo wondered how he'd ever thought anything about her to be plain.
It was getting close to three o'clock. A bright day outside, sun not far past the zenith and just starting to edge the buildings across the street with shadows. The dump or junkyard rearing its head, another tie to Mudda Raymon's vision, had unsettled him badly.
And another concern nagged at him. He'd always had good instincts about how deep shit was getting, and his alarm bells were going off all over the place. It was driving him nuts that Rebecca was at risk. And he was partly responsible—he'd pulled her into this deeper every step of the way, bringing her to the Rappaport scene, asking her to spy on Biedermann, encouraging the visit to Ronald Parker. If Geppetto was Flannery, he'd already demonstrated that he had the resources to know just about everything. Rebecca would be just as prominent on his radar as Mo was.
Which meant that somehow Mo had to protect her. And Rachel. But as with everything else about this case, he had no idea how. Get her away from the case somehow. But it was probably too late for that. Plus her training and talents were crucial at this stage.
Suddenly he felt overwhelmed again, his thoughts fuzzy and chaotic. Rebecca saw it, looked at him with concern. "You're fading, Morgan," she said. Her eyes narrowed suspiciously. "Did you eat anything today?"
Mo tried to remember. He hadn't felt like eating dinner after seeing Flannery yesterday, hadn't had time for breakfast or lunch today. His abdomen had that hollowed-out, charred feeling that came from pouring coffee into an empty stomach. A bite to eat wouldn't be bad. At the same time, he was afraid eating would make him sleepy. But if he was going to crash, it had better be back at Carla's mom's mausoleum, or he might miss Gus's return call. Which was very important just now.
"Gotta get back to White Plains," he mumbled. He lurched upright. "Got a couple of irons in the fire that can't wait."
She frowned, but didn't press for details. "I'm going to make you a sandwich for the drive," she said. She went into the kitchen, and he heard the clink of dishes, the chunk of the refrigerator door. Mo found his jacket, pulled it on, checked the bedroom for his things. In the kitchen, he came up behind her and draped himself around her, burying his face in her hair. She smelled like sun on summer grass. He shut his eyes and just felt her movements as she spread mayo on bread and laid out lettuce and slices of chicken.
"Saw Rachel and her friends as I came in," he said into her hair.
" 'The call of the wild,' " she said accusingly.
"She told her friends I was your boyfriend."
Her shoulders dropped in exasperation. "I never used that word!"
"What word did you use?"
"Rachel and I are quite close. But there are . . . areas where I feel entitled to my privacy. I told her you were a professional colleague." She did something to his sandwich and went on primly, "A professional colleague I was quite attracted to."
"How'd she like that? What's her verdict on the cop boyfriend?"
Rebecca turned and presented him with a plastic-wrapped sandwich on the flat of her hand. "She asked if you were going to come bowling with us again tomorrow. Our Sunday ritual. I said if it was all right with her, and you had the time, I would certainly like that. She gave her permission."
"She just wants to chaperone our dates."
"You don't know much about adolescent psychology, do you? Mo, in her language, that's a major thumbs-up! I was very pleased." He hadn't taken the sandwich, so she tucked it into his jacket pocket, then came against him again. "Sometime soon," she said into his shoulder, "can we go to your house? I want to see where you live. I want you to cook something for me, I bet you're a great cook."
Just the thought of her coming to Carla's mom's mausoleum made his stomach clench. But he mumbled, "Yeah, sure. Yeah, sometime that would be good, sure."
She herded him out the door, waved good-bye. He went to the elevator, hit the call button, and waited in a kind of agony. The sweetness with her was so good. The thought of what they were up against, what could happen: so terrible. In his whole life, he couldn't remember ever feeling two simultaneous emotions so opposite and so intense.
41
MR. SMITH SAT IN an aluminum lawn chair, catching his breath and feeling both angry and sorry for himself. Number Four was on the wall in the next room, maybe asleep but probably listening and no doubt very glad to be ignored tonight. Number Three was panting, covered with sweat. It seemed like a good moment to take a break.
Thanks to Three's screwups, Morgan Ford and Rebecca Ingalls were actually doing it, beginning to unravel the whole thing he'd spent these years building. This afternoon, back at his Manhattan apartment, he'd listened to the most recent surveillance tape. He wasn't sure which got to him worse, listening to their sex act with all its tenderness and sensuality—normal, common human intimacies forever denied him!—or their conversations, which showed they'd made startlingly accurate leaps of inference and deduction.
The question was, how to adapt the plan? He'd have preferred more time, at least enough for Number Four to come online. But on the other hand, he'd always intended a major theatrical presentation at the end. Maybe the Dynamic Duo of Ford and Ingalls were precisely the opportunity he needed, and he should just move ahead to the final stage.
His own indecision made him furious. Go for the finale now, or try again to stave off the end? He hated indecision. Indecision caused you to hesitate, made you vulnerable. It took away your control, made you susceptible to the control of others. He'd been down that road before. Never again. He had been successful thus far by cutting the strings. Continued success depended on continued, decisive assertion of freedom.
They were in what had once been the living room of the old house, a spacious room now set up as a conditioning chamber. They needed space to move around, so it was almost empty of furniture. The windows were covered with sturdy plywood boxes built around homey drapes so that from outside, even pretty close up, they'd look like normal windows. A pair of projectors on a table beamed photos of Detective Morgan Ford against one wall, one of them an ID shot lifted from his personnel files and another from a newspaper article. They had worked on Rebecca Ingalls earlier, using slides from her book jacket photos and shots Mr. Smith had taken on the sly.
Number Three huddled on the floor across the room, naked but unfettered. He was well beyond the stage when the strings and other paraphernalia would be of use. His next tasks wouldn't involve the ritual, and anyway he needed to obey commands even when able to move freely: He'd have to be able to act adaptively while still operating on program.
And he was doing great. Always a terrific subject, Three. And that was the problem. With conditioning, it was easy come, easy go. Three programmed easily, but just as easily lost the program. He was too fluid inside, too changeable. Nothing would stick for long with this guy. Maybe that's why the sadness tonight, Mr. Smith thought: Human beings were such fallible creatures. So fickle. Such prisoners of their own weaknesses.
For a while, Mr. Smith had considered trying the radio implant on Thr
ee as a way to compensate for his tendency to shed programming. Plus, with the situation as it was, he had to get a lot of mileage out of these weekend sessions, before the workweek began and he had only evenings. The experiment with the golden retriever showed he could do it.
The radio-control idea was nothing new. Even back then, they'd experimented with direct neural stimulation via implants in human subjects. The paranoid fringe had been festering ever since with rumors of implant-controlled assassins, whose every act was governed by somebody at a console somewhere. But the reality was much more crude. In those days, they'd had neither the cranial imaging technology nor the knowledge of human neurology to do anything as sophisticated as dictating specific complex actions. Nowadays, with all the advances in technology, it was probably a different story, even the New York Times carried stories on how they were using radio-controlled rats for spying and drug interdiction. But back then all an implant could do was send a shock to the subject's brain, causing disorientation, fear, and pain.
It was, however, extreme fear and pain, and as an adjunct to conditioning and hypnotherapy, a remotely activated trigger for activating previously instilled posthypnotic commands, it had some useful applications.
But then he'd worried that with the minimal equipment he had here, he'd screw up the surgery—a hundredth of an inch to the left or right or too deep, and he could kill or paralyze Three. It would be his first human implant in thirty years, he'd be rusty. Or the apparatus would impair Three's fighting skills or decision-making at clutch time. Dogs and rats were one thing, humans another. Vastly more complex brains and behavioral repertoires.
So: Back to traditional methods. With a vengeance. Extreme measures were justified. There wasn't much time, these sessions had to really count. And anyway, Three deserved it.
Mr. Smith tossed a water bottle toward Three, who was taken by surprise but still caught it easily. Reflexes intact, that was good. Excellent physique, too, good muscle mass and little body fat.