Puppets Read online

  Van Voorden had given him good directions to the old power station, into Buchanan and then over toward the river and south past the Indian Point nuke plants. He passed the red-and-white tower and rounded domes, continued along the heavily wooded shore, and came up to a white, flash bar-topped Chevy Suburban that was parked across from a dusty little church. The Buchanan cop showed him to a dirt access road, and he rolled slowly down the bluff through a mishmash of trees, vines, broken masonry, abandoned gravel pits, trash. At first he worried about his oil pan, but then the land smoothed out and the trees opened to a big view of the Hudson River.

  The old station loomed at the water's edge, a massive brick cube about four stories tall. It had the tall, round-topped windows and decorative masonry of the last century, but now the windows were covered with corrugated sheet steel. Originally it had been surrounded by many smaller outbuildings, but in the years since it had been decommissioned these had fallen into heaps of rubble grown over with weeds and vines. The road ended in a dusty parking area near the rearing wall, and Mo pulled up next to a pair of Buchanan cruisers.

  The shore of the Hudson here was a kind of no-man's-land, with the power-company property theoretically off-limits to the public but widely used by hikers and teenagers who enjoyed the views and rocky outcroppings. When Mo had been in high school in New Rochelle, he'd sometimes come over this way with friends. They'd bring beer and start campfires and get drunk and make out, looking across miles of slate-blue water, the rolling headlands, tugboats nudging barges upstream, the sparkling lights of the far shore. Twenty years later, the ground was littered with beer cans, Styrofoam cups, fast-food junk, used condoms, blown newspapers and plastic garbage bags caught in bushes, all mixed with industrial rubble left over from the power station's early days: old machine parts, broken concrete walls, railroad ties rotting in haphazard stacks. Hiking paths had been beaten into the grass and sumac brush, meandering along the river. Just to the north, gigantic steel gantries reared on either side of the river, holding sagging power cables from the nuke plant.

  Mo followed a path close to the wall of the building, wondering where Van Voorden, or the victim and murderer, had gotten inside. Around on the water side, he found a crumbling flight of broad concrete steps leading to an outlandishly huge, ceremonial doorway. New York, the Empire State. The doors were covered with graffiti-decorated sheet steel, but one corner of the rusted metal had been pried away to make a triangular opening about three feet tall, big enough to crawl through. He was just crouching down to go inside when a man in a brown police uniform came around the far corner.

  "Oh," the guy said."Detective Ford? I was waiting for you, but then I thought I'd look around a bit. I'm Van Voorden."

  "Got held up by traffic," Mo told him. The parade of Land Rovers.

  They shook hands. Van Voorden was tall, bony, with a long neck and a protuberant Adam's apple of such size and angularity that Mo became uncomfortably conscious of his own, bobbing in his throat.

  "We don't get much of this here," Van Voorden said."This is my first, my first, uh-—" He petered out, not sure what to call it.

  "Let's take a look," Mo suggested.

  They crawled through the opening and into an entry foyer that was lit only by thin lines of sunlight squeezing around the edges of the sheet steel over the doors and windows. The room had tiled walls, and the air was humid, earthy, smelling of rot and piss. The mash of litter continued inside, and ferns grew in cracks in the floor.

  Van Voorden switched on a big four-battery light and panned it around the vault.

  "Basically," he said, "this thing is just one big room, except for in front here there's this entry and a pair of offices or something on each side. We got to go through there"—shining his light on a doorway opposite the front doors—"into the main room, down some stairs, and back under where we are now. I've got some people down there now."

  "Is this the only way inside?" Mo asked. He had brought his own flash and lit it up also.

  "I think so. The kids that found the body came in and out this way, so that's how we made entry."

  Van Voorden led the way into the main chamber. It was, as he said, a single huge room that had once housed the massive boilers and turbines but that was now stripped and mostly empty from floor to ceiling. The room rose straight to the rafters high overhead, cavernous and obscure, lit only by slit gaps in the sheet metal. Swallows swooped to nests in the rafters.

  They went down a flight of stairs to aground floor of buckled concrete and dirt with scraggy bushes growing through, litter everywhere, little circles of wood ash and charcoal where trespassers had made campfires. Mo felt it before he consciously saw it, the subliminally registering ordering of things: a circle of beer cans around a star shape of overlaid boards, zigzags of loose bricks with cigarette butts set into the angles. At the bottom of the stairs, Van Voorden steered him toward the front of the building again, where the lower level was divided into several rooms. Mo heard the mutter of voices and saw other flashlights panning in one of the rooms, and then as they got closer, he smelled the corpse. Despite his reluctance to breathe deeply, he felt a gust of relief blow through him: Not a fresh corpse, the new guy wasn't on a rampage of a kill every other day. This one had to be much older. Maybe even a victim left over from the original Howdy Doody killer, who'd been apprehended, what, four months ago.

  The death room was a concrete and brick chamber the size of an average living room, lit by flashlights and by slits of daylight around a tiny, steel-covered window up near the ceiling. Van Voorden introduced him to the Buchanan officers, a woman and two men. They all held handkerchiefs over their faces. A glance showed Mo that they'd done a great job of overlaying the dirt floor with prints of cop-uniforms hoes.

  Then Van Voorden introduced him to the corpse, and the others obligingly coordinated their flashlights on the wall. Older, yes. In fact, the body had come apart and only portions remained strung to the wall: two forearms and hands with clutching skeletal fingers, an inverted head held in place by polyline around a segment of bare spinal column. The rest had rotted or been eaten by rodents until it couldn't support its own weight, and the torso had fallen away onto the rubbled floor. One desiccated leg was still in place, lines taut from the mummified knee and ankle to the eyelets sunk into the concrete, but the other had fallen. The bulk of the body was a tangled mound on the floor, overlaid by a cloud of delicate white mold. Mo panned his light away from it and around the room, seeing again the telltale organization of objects in the rubble. Holding his breath and leaning close to the inverted head—from the long, golden hair hanging down, he guessed this one had been a woman—he used a tongue depressor to probe in the desiccated jerky just above where the ear would've been. There it was, a little circular pit going down to the bone, another signature wound of the Howdy Doody killer or his copier. No sign of the nylon handcuffs, but he looked closely at the cords, and, yes, it was weed-whacker line, ribbed with sharp edges. Not fish line.

  "Like I said, this is the first one of, uh, these I've ever dealt with,"Van Voorden said. His voice was muffled by the handkerchief he held over his mouth and nose.

  "Who found her?" Mo asked.

  "Kids. A couple of boys from town, thirteen- or fourteen-year-olds, I know the one of them's folks. They were out here Sunday, goofing around, dared each other to come back under here. They came in, saw this, then left in a big hurry. I didn't hear about it until this morning. The boys bicycled home and weren't sure whether to tell anyone, they were afraid they'd get in trouble for trespassing in here. But they both ended up telling their parents, and they called me."

  The corpse was so decayed that from medical evidence alone it would be hard to tell when the murder had occurred. There'd be rot, mold, animal and insect damage. No finger skin remaining for prints, but Mo saw a half-circle of teeth down in the tangle, and dental records might help them get a name. Once they'd identified the victim, they could talk to friends or family and pin down when she'd last be
en seen. He hoped it would turn out to be five months ago, and then he could give this one to the Howdy Doody prosecutors.

  "How often do you think people come inside here?" Mo asked.

  Van Voorden shrugged. "My guess is not that often. Not till school's out, another few weeks. Probably people come inside the building almost every weekend, but I'll bet not many come back under here, too creepy and dark. I know I sure as hell wouldn't."

  It sounded like a fair assessment to Mo. His guess was that the corpse was at least a month old, but it could as easily have been here six months or more, especially if the murder had happened during winter. There'd be fat damage but the cold would've kept insects and bacterial rot down until the warmer weather set in.

  "Okay," he said, making a decision. "I'm going to ask you all to follow each other single file out of the building the way you came in. Then I'd like you to start taking the metal down off the front doors so the Crime Scene people and the ME can get their equipment through. Avoid handling the area where the gap is, we'll look for hairs and fibers on the surfaces there. Also, if I can ask one of you to wait in the parking area for the others and direct them back here when they come, I'd appreciate it."

  They looked at each other, hearing his dismissal, but did as he told them. They knew he was thinkingcountry cops. But it was true, he wished they'd had the sense not to mill around in here, obscuring other prints, brushing the rough walls and leaving their own clothing fibers and follicles and danders everywhere. On the other hand, with a month or six months gone by already, a lot of that would be useless anyway. Between cop prints in the dirt on the floor, he could see a solid mesh of rat tracks and a sprinkling of droppings. Out in the big room, there'd no doubt be the footprints of hundreds of visitors, going back decades.

  Mo stood back from the body, trying to visualize what had happened here. A woman wouldn't have come into a place like this alone, so either she came with the killer, meaning she knew him, or he caught her elsewhere and made her come here. Or, much less likely, killed her elsewhere and dragged her here.

  He startled as a rat appeared in a crack in the foundation, slithered down the wall, and disappeared into another gap. He decided to get out of the room while he waited for the forensic team, and he walked back to the door, carefully stepping in the tracks of the others.

  He looked over the big room, the dim light just revealing the rubble on the ground. It was a lousy place to die, lonesome and scary and filthy. What had happened here? What had the killer done to her? How long had it taken? The stacked and arranged geometries in the rubble everywhere nagged at him, signifying a horrible compulsion. Ordering,controlling, the environment. It was all about control. He experienced an unwanted flashback to O'Connor's house, the awful contorted person on the wall. The vision stabbed at him before he shut it down with an effort.

  From reading the Howdy Doody files on Friday, he knew that the cause of death was strangulation by the line around the neck. The head wounds had been made by antique ice tongs—when they'd caught Ronald Parker, the Howdy Doody killer, they'd found the tongs in his car, the points of which matched the wounds on his victim's temples. Between the strings and the arrangements of objects, it was clear that the ritual centered oncontrol, the killer manipulating his victims absolutely. Nobody had answered the question of whether Parker had done the arranging of objects before, during, or after the killing, or what exactly it signified.

  Mo agreed with Marsden, Ronald Parker was the one, no mistake. He had been caught in his car, four months ago, speeding away from his last attempted kill, and the police had found a spool of plastic line, disposable handcuffs, tongs, and other paraphernalia in his trunk. They had established that he'd had prior contact with at least two of the victims. His background matched the profile developed by the FBI's Behavioral Sciences people and the independent shrink they'd consulted, and they had looked forward to running psych tests. Mapping the mind of the monster.

  But Parker wasn't answering any questions. On his second night behind bars, he had hung himself in his cell, using the leg of his prison pants. Guards had found him in time to save his life, but not his mind: He sustained severe brain damage from oxygen deprivation. One of the photos in Parker's file showed his cell after they'd removed him, the geometric arrangements of toilet paper, hairbrush, prison slippers. Yes, Parker was the one, but he wasn't in any condition to tell anybody much of anything.

  Mo listened to the silence in the cave like room. It was a scary place, even for a six-foot cop armed with a Glock-17, even during daytime, even with a bunch of other cops just outside. It must have been terrifying for the victim, an agony of fear before the physical agonies began.

  He walked farther back into the big, dim room, his flashlight illuminating little more than the ground in front of his feet. Rearing up from the rubbled floor were two large, tapering brick columns, eight feet wide at the base, once maybe ten feet tall but now crumbling and raining loose bricks. At one time they must have been the main support for massive floor timbers, but now they stood solitary, twenty feet apart, casting pools of darkness that the ghost of light from above didn't penetrate. He approached one of them warily, hating the darkness, his right hand traveling to the nylon of his holster and the soothing weight of his gun. It was an irrational fear, the killer was long gone. Given the age of this corpse, it was probably Parker, already behind bars.

  The stepped bricks of the tapered columns had been decorated. In the beam of his flashlight, he saw beer cans set neatly on each little shelf and surrounded by chips of broken glass. All this organizing and arranging must have taken hours. Did the killer talk while he worked? Did he make the victim watch? Did he arrange for a while, torture for a while, arrange again?

  No,Mo knew suddenly. Abruptly he knew how it worked, saw it clearly in his mind's eye. The image sickened him.

  Bam! a metallic blow echoed in the big room. Mo's heart answered with a series of punches inside his chest.

  Bam! again, and he realized it was the Buchanan cops starting work on the front door. Sounded as if they were using sledgehammers, for Christ's sake. But maybe it meant that the others had arrived. He got himself under control and began walking toward the entrance, thinking that maybe he'd take a couple minutes of sunshine before coming back down.

  7

  TUESDAY, THINGS BEGAN TO coalesce. Mo managed to reach Biedermann, who sounded like a chilly son of a bitch, and scheduled a meeting with him down at the FBI Manhattan field office later in the day. Then he got hold of the secretary for Dr. In galls, the consulting psychologist who had worked on the Howdy Doody profiling with the FBI's Behavioral Sciences Unit, and was lucky enough to step into the gap left by a canceled lunch meeting.

  The White Plains police and St. Pierre had done some good legwork, establishing that while no one in Daniel O'Connor's neighborhood had seen anything particularly suspicious, several neighbors had noticed O'Connor's car in his driveway all day Thursday. A visit to the copy shop he'd managed revealed that he'd been at work on Wednesday but hadn't shown on Thursday. The day staff had wondered where he was and had left messages on his answering machine, but they thought maybe they'd gotten the staffing calendar screwed up and so hadn't gotten alarmed until Friday.

  The corpse in the Buchanan power station had been removed, and the Forensic Identification Unit had made casts of her teeth and photos to be distributed to dentists and orthodontists. From a quick inspection of the degree of fusion of the pubic symphysis of her pelvic bones, Angelo had guessed the victim's age to be late twenties, and he declared her blond hair natural. He measured a humerus and provisionally set her height at five-four. So St. Pierre had started a database search for reports of Caucasian, late-twenties blondes over five-two gone missing within the last year.

  The psychologist maintained an office on eighty-fifth Street, an upper-crusty neighborhood not far from central Park. Mo drove down on the Saw Mill Paver Parkway, segued onto the Henry Hudson, joined the backed-up cars at the toll station. The
big city gathering around him, the view of the cramped New Jersey shore across the water, the odor of some pollutant that smelled like burning chocolate: It made him nostalgic. A spring day, the trees busted out with leaves and blossoms, the sky looking celebratory despite global warming and the New Jersey factory chimneys. He'd lived just north of the great colossus of Manhattan all his life, had come in through its various gateways thousands of times, and yet he never got over the feeling of pleasurable excitement and trepidation it gave him to be wrapped in its dark, dirty, gutsy bear hug. What had he thought he'd do with his life when he was twelve and would come down with his father to go to the Natural History Museum?Dad had done a decent job of encouraging Mo's love of things historical, archaeological, maybe envisioning a scholarly career for him, who knows. If asked where he'd be twenty-seven years later, twelve-year-old Mo would probably have said he'd be doing archaeological expeditions in exotic locations when he wasn't living in his fancy penthouse with a view of the Park. And he'd probably have said he'd be married to Deborah Weinstein, a blond, early-developing girl in seventh grade who for an entire semester had embodied for him the feminine mystique. She used to write him tantalizingly flirtatious but disappointingly vague letters in a round, pneumatic-looking script with smiley faces in the O's.

  So how close was he? Now he was thirty-nine and had just broken up with the fourth major love of his life, he was lonely and horny and lived in his ex's mom's house, now even more hollow with the removal of Carla's stuff. He was an underpaid cop feeling alone in the police society that was his only contact with human beings. He spent his time investigating sickos who hurt or killed people, and the closest he got to archaeology was poking around in the desiccated remains of murder victims in abandoned Hudson Paver power stations.