It was still uncomfortably fresh in Mo's memory. Biedermann lay dead, there was one man dead in the middle of a lane and another, it turned out, with his throat cut in the other booth. Rachel was in shock, the old man was lying on the floor, the others down at lane three were trying to console each other. And once the threat to her daughter was gone, Rebecca had kind of gone into shock herself. Mo got his bearings again and went to the front desk and picked up the phone. But Biedermann's last words stopped him before he dialed. You think you're free now? Dream on. It's worth your life just to know about this. This fucking thing would be controlling their lives long after Biedermann was in his grave.
With the pain in his head he couldn't think straight, but still it occurred to him that there was another call he could make first.
When he got Flannery on the line, he said, "I've got something for you to take credit for. A real springboard. But it's only yours if you get here within twenty minutes."
Sunday, Flannery was at his bachelor's pad Manhattan apartment. He made it in eighteen minutes. Mo unlocked the Star Bowl's front door to let him in.
"You were right about Biedermann," Mo mumbled, trying to ignore the crushed bones grating in his jaw. "There's a file containing materials that blow the whistle on secret U.S. military programs. I don't know any details, but I can guess it'll make the national news for weeks. You're also right that I'm not in a position to use this, I wouldn't know how. I don't need the headache. But somebody like you—
"Gotcha," Flannery said, oblivious to Mo's less than flattering intent. They paused at the top of the steps down into the alley. Mo had deliberately left the lights off, so it was still dark, but they had a pretty good view of the scene: Rebecca holding Rachel close and stroking her hair, the bodies on the floor, the others huddled and just holding on. "Great God Almighty," Flannery said appreciatively. He practically licked his chops. For a moment his eyes went click-click, the wheels turning, calculating odds and angles. Then he turned to Mo. "Okay. Deal. So here's how we're going to play it."
Mo had made good use of the minutes before Flannery arrived, and Rebecca and Rachel already knew what to say and not to say: It was about jealousy, Biedermann going off the deep end after she'd ended their relationship, thank God Flannery had seen it coming and had charged to the rescue.
Flannery went to work on the survivors at lane three, finessing their recollection of events. Their memory of what the perpetrator had said was jumbled anyway, the old man and his wife couldn't hear very well, the young woman and her husband had been injured, the kid traumatized, everybody preoccupied. In the bad light, they hadn't gotten a good look at the guy Biedermann had handcuffed to the ball return down near the other end. Rebecca and Flannery would both say it was the courageous DA himself, who came when he put together the scenario and rushed to the Star Bowl at the very last minute. By the time more of the DA's people arrived, only a few minutes later and just in front of the ambulances Mo had called, Mo was gone.
In fact, he'd never been there.
But that still left a loose thread in the whole scheme, one that could threaten them if he didn't act immediately. So before leaving, Mo had stopped at Biedermann's corpse and rummaged in his pockets until he found his keys. He couldn't quite remember the address Gus had given him for Biedermann, but of course Rebecca knew it. Then he drove across the George Washington Bridge and into the Upper West Side. Flannery would cover the bowling alley scene, they could maybe just manage to fudge that, but Biedermann had to have been listening in on Rebecca's phone cans and probably live conversations at her apartment. Which meant that Biedermann kept monitoring equipment somewhere. He couldn't have been able to listen at all times, so most likely he'd rigged it to make tapes that he could review when time permitted.
If there were any such tapes, they were dangerous. Mo's whole plan hinged on Zelek and company not realizing how much he and Rebecca knew. If Zelek got the tapes, he'd hear the two of them piecing it together.
At the three-flat brownstone he checked the windows of nearby buildings, then gimped up the stoop steps and unlocked the outer door. Good luck so far, Sunday night, people winding down early, nobody on the street. He put on latex gloves and went up to Biedermann's third-floor apartment. Nicer furniture than Mo's own hellhole, but dimly lit, musty, not a place where anyone really lived. Taking a turn through the rooms, he saw only the meagerest tokens of domestic life. Most interesting were the handful of photos: some hard-faced men in camo outfits and face paint, standing in front of a ruined-looking patch of jungle. A busty, matronly old gal in outof-date clothes. A dog. And a blond kid standing between a meek-looking woman and a man Mo first took to be Erik Biedermann until he noticed the fender of the station wagon just behind the group. Had to be a late-1940s vintage. So the man would be Biedermann's father, and the boy with the locked-in face Biedermann himself. The son's head was tilted slightly away from the man, signifying some aversion or resentment. Or fear.
Rebecca would love this, he thought: a clue to the original trauma suffered at the hands of a tyrannical and very blond, blue-eyed father.
But there was no time to delve further. The pain from his shattered jaw rose in blinding flashes, Mo kept feeling himself slipping toward unconsciousness. And the moment Zelek heard about the bowling alley fiasco, his guys'd be all over this place, sanitizing it, discovering more about Biedermann's secret life. Mo had to find the surveillance setup. But what if it wasn't here? Maybe Biedermann kept the gear at another place, maybe at the secret lab that must be somewhere near the old dump.
But then he opened a louvered closet and found a set of rackmounted electronics, including two reel-to-reel tape recorders, a cassette dubbing setup, some heavily customized telephone equipment sprouting wires like Medusa's head. He took the two reels from the machines, then looked around until he found a stash of half a dozen others and a bunch of cassettes. He stowed them in a paper grocery bag from under the kitchen sink and then found a couple of fresh reels in unopened boxes, broke the seals, replaced them on the machines. Checked the telephone answering machine for messages. None. He pushed ERASE five or six times anyway.
Not perfect, but it would have to do. He locked up and left with the bag full of tapes.
The next day, jaw wired and finger splinted, Mo searched carefully through his house and Rebecca's apartment, looking for surveillance devices. The three bugs and the relay box ended up in the river that night. The tapes they burned in the barbecue pit behind Carla's mom's house.
The scenario he'd crafted with Flannery would just about play. Especially, Mo figured, with some help from interested parties behind the scenes.
Mo and Rebecca had played dumb for Flannery, but Flannery would have learned all the details about the program from the evidence in Biedermann's duffel. And he'd done with the information just what Mo had anticipated. Mo and Rebecca, had they showed interest in whistle-blowing, were small fry, the kind you shut down, got rid of. Flannery, though, he was big enough to bargain, sufficiently lacking in conscience, and very smart with people and deals. He was in position to use his knowledge to his advancement and more than willing to make himself useful. Hey, he wasn't selling out, he was buying in.
The FBI put a tight lid on the whole case, one of those demonstrations of press obfuscation and spin control only "national security" warranted. Later, Mo heard though the grapevine that the FBI had located Biedermann's secret Westchester place. Nobody knew any details, but the consensus was that Biedermann had flipped while working on the Howdy Doody case and had started playing puppet games himself. Another example of job stress, too damn bad. The house had apparently belonged to his mother's sister, Eleanor Smith, who'd left it to him when she died. All he'd had to do to keep it secret was finesse keeping the Smith name on the tax rolls.
As a psychologist, Rebecca was dying to learn more about the original abuse that Biedermann had experienced, and if the old junkyard really had a role. She was also curious as to how many puppets Biedermann had been work
ing with, whether the house contained evidence that there'd been others. But she resigned herself to not knowing. Showing any curiosity at all would have been a very bad plan.
Rebecca brought Mo out of his thoughts and back to the heat and bustle of Central Park by slapping the newspaper on her lap. "Of course," she said, "we still have a problem."
He looked around at the happy activity, the swaying high foliage. "That he never gave Biedermann's materials to the press. That he traded it all for his next step up. That the program goes on and nobody's doing anything about it."
"It kills me, Mo. I can't stand that somewhere they're still . . . doing it. Betraying basic human—God, I can't even—" Her eyebrows drew together and she glanced quickly over to the people on the nearby benches. But no one was interested.
"It screws me up, too," Mo whispered. "I never saw this as a permanent solution. More just buying us some time."
"How much time?" she asked. "And how much do we pay for it?"
As always, she'd seen to the heart of the issue. Their cover wasn't perfect. Realistically, it couldn't last. Maybe Zelek would think Mo was too dumb to figure things out, but no way he'd believe it about Rebecca. And maybe Flannery could give them some shelter, for a while, but Flannery had to have guessed what they knew. So the question was, when would it come back to bite them? And in what form? Not an outright whack, Mo figured, at least not for a while, that'd raise too many eyebrows. But at the very least, if Flannery was giving them shelter, it would be in exchange for something. Mo could easily imagine a future visit or call from him: Hey, I've got a little project I need your special expertise on. Nothing illegal, just marginal procedure. A little carrot-and-stick thing. You guys help me out, I'll help you out, everybody stays happy.
"I don't know," he told Rebecca. "Hopefully enough time to figure out what we should do. To maybe decide something about . . . " He stalled out, hesitant to mention it: About us. About our own priorities.
But of course she understood. It shut them both up for a few minutes. After that night at the Star Bowl, Rebecca had pulled back. She said things had gone too fast, she'd been impulsive again, Rachel needed a lot of her time. And Mo was deeply associated in Rachel's mind with the trauma of the bowling alley, she needed to build a basis of trust of him before she accepted her mother with him. Also, Rebecca needed some time to think through being with a guy whose job involved what they had just been through. The goddamned job.
They all needed some recovery time, Mo had to admit. After something like this there were a lot of hurts inside you. At first you were numb, just glad to be alive, in a state of shock that protected you. Then you began realizing how it had changed you. What was it, Biedermann's agony? The program, what it implied about the United States government, or about human beings in general? All the corpses, the puppets? You couldn't look at other people the same way. Couldn't read the newspaper headlines without a crawly feeling, that sense of things working behind the scenes, it seemed as if every time Mo opened the Times he saw another item Hke DEFENSE STRATEGISTS REASSESS RESPONSE TO TERRORIST THREAT. Sometimes you woke in the night in a sudden sweat.
No, you couldn't blame Rebecca for pulling back a bit.
Okay, so Mo was rolling with that. He could understand that. He had his own stuff to deal with anyway. He'd taken a two-week leave to get his jaw and finger rebuilt. He'd found an apartment, a three-room on the south end of White Plains, and had gone into his credit cards to make it nice: a couple of neo-Navajo rugs, a decent audio system, a few framed prints for the walls. A vacuum cleaner to keep things up. Not a palace, but it was getting there, almost the kind of place where you could have somebody over.
The grand jury hearing about Big Willie had been delayed during Mo's recovery. By the time the jury convened, Flannery was a media darling and was feeling grateful for Mo's gift, so he hadn't pressed the case. The hearing was a formality, the county's case perfunctory, and the jury had determined against probable cause. No charges would be brought.
So things were getting sorted out.
But there was still the big hurt, the real killer: the aftermath of Mike St. Pierre's death. Racing to the Star Bowl, Mo had called in to report the incident in the marsh, officer down, perpetrator dead. Later, when asked where he'd gone, he told his colleagues that he'd been badly injured and in pain, had rushed off to get medical treatment,. and had passed out in his car in the hospital parking lot. Came to hours later and hauled himself into Emergency. All true—he just omitted telling anyone about the detour he'd made between the marsh and the emergency ward.
But none of that helped him with Lilly St. Pierre. Lil and three kids, it was too fucking sad and it was all Mo's fault. He shouldn't have called Mike that Sunday, or they should have stayed doubled up. Something. Anything. Marsden, Rebecca, everybody argued that there was no way Mo could have anticipated the attack. But it didn't wash. He had known, he'd just ignored that shrilling nerve of warning that day.
Mo felt like it should have been him to bring the news to Lilly, but Paderewski and Valsangiacomo had done it that night while Mo was at the hospital. They said Lil had dropped in her tracks, fell right down in the doorway. Then the kids had come in and seen her and started crying. This was the hell part. Whenever Mo had called, Lil had hung up as soon as she'd recognized his voice. He'd sent flowers and cards, but at the funeral Lil couldn't give him so much as a glance, just stood across the grave from him with her raw, red face averted. She looked so damaged. So different from the proud, strong Madonna with the sunlight halo, the mother of the happy mammal pile.
And there was nothing anybody, least of all Morgan Ford, could do about it.
On the brighter side, lying around recovering had given him time to chew on a lot of stuff. Hadn't discussed it all with Rebecca, but at last he was feeling a little more ready if and when she brought it up. Starting with Biedermann's comment: You think you and I are so different? Take a look at yourself. That jab had slipped under his guard and up between his ribs. He couldn't deny that, yeah, he would go to just about any length to be free of the feeling of strings on him. That somehow both his and Biedermann's life commitments seemed to require bending rules, working outside the system to defend what they believed in, and, too often, killing people. Yeah, and that neither ever quite managed to have a normal, regular domestic life or lasting relationships. Touche, you bastard, he acknowledged.
But ultimately he'd decided, no, that's not who he was. Biedermann's response was to control others in return, but Mo had an instinct to relinquish control once in a while. In the long run, your best bet for slipping free of the control of the system or bosses or your personal demons was to relax and let your own humanity happen. Surely Rebecca would see that: He'd never tried to force their relationship, her sense of timing, he'd accepted Rachel's presence in everything, he didn't have to be in the driver's seat all the time.
The biggest thing would be the job, how she could be with a guy whose profession brought him into situations like the Star Bowl and Big Willie. And she was right, it was the thing dead center in whatever he didn't like about himself, his day, his thoughts. But, he'd decided, it was also central to what he did like. Paradoxical, but that was life, you had to stake out your commitments somewhere and stick with them.
He wouldn't blame her at all if she brought it to a choice between her or his work. He just didn't know what he would do if she did.
Rebecca brought him out of his thoughts again by taking his hand. "There's something I've been wanting to say, and I keep not getting to it. But I think I need to tell you."
"Okay—" Mo felt a wave of uneasiness come over him. She was telepathic, she'd been thinking down the same avenues.
"There's something you did that drives me crazy—no, Mo, in a good way—when I think about it. That night. The first thing you did when you got loose was to come to Rachel. To see if she was all right, to comfort her."
"Well, she—"
"That means a lot to me. I'm having a hard time telli
ng you this—how much that means to me. I think it says a lot about who you are."
Mo felt the relief of a near miss, the balm of her praise. "And what's that?"
"Mm, a lot of things. Nice things." Rebecca turned toward him on the park bench, sun-dappled hair, blue eyes straight into his. Those long, good thighs, driving him crazy.
"So what're you going to do about it?" he asked.
"I'm working on that. Giving it a lot of thought." She squeezed his hand meaningfully.
Mo liked the way she said it. Funny and serious at the same time, full of promise.
She had folded the paper and set it on her lap. Mo was feeling pretty good, but suddenly the half of the headline he could see jumped out at him and gave him a jolt: KILLER . . . The subhead began NINE DEAD IN . . . and reflexively he reached and twitched the paper open.
He was relieved to see the rest: KILLER HEAT WAVE SWEEPS MIDWEST. NINE DEAD IN OHIO, INDIANA.
fust forces of nature, he reassured himself quickly. Not mankind's little propensity. Not something to get all existential about. Get a grip.
Still, a smaller heading gave him an unpleasant buzz, NEW YORK AREA BRACES FOR MORE OF SAME. Tell me about it, he thought, suddenly feeling the jittery sweat on his body. Christ, it was scorching already.
When he looked over at Rebecca, she gave him a small, rueful grin that said she had observed his reaction and knew where it was coming from.
But for now, neither of them wanted to say any more about it. So they both just turned their faces to the sun. A moment in the sun.
This was nice. Whatever the future held, you had to grab a moment like this, give it its due. Priorities.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For helping me with this book, I owe sincerest gratitude to: