Puppets Page 7

  Mo gave that a moment's thought. Serial murder often progressed by a predictable general sequence of events, starting with the procurement phase. This was when the intentional, organized killer selected the victim. Usually the victims were people who somehow fit into the killer's mental world in some specific way—their appearance was right, or their professional roles, or their living habits. Something brought them to his attention and made them seem desirable targets. The killer increasingly incorporated the victims into his delusional scheme as he learned more about their habits and worked out how to gain access to them. The problem was that without some pattern of connection between victims—physical and material, not just some warped psychological link in the killer's mind—it was next to impossible to catch a serial murderer.

  "So," Mo said, "given all this, how'd he get caught? I know he botched an attempt and was caught fleeing the scene. How did that go down?"

  But Dr. Ingalls was looking unhappy. She didn't answer immediately. Instead she bunched up the trash bag and stuffed it into a wastebasket. Then she sat down in the chair behind the desk, and Mo got the distinct sense she had retreated to the shelter there.

  "The FBI took a proactive role," she said. "And it worked. And now, yes, I would like some prep time, thank you. It has been a pleasure, detective ford."

  He almost called her on her sudden chilly formality, she seemed like the kind of person you could challenge that way. But then the dry voice of Marie came out of the intercom:"Your one o'clock is here."

  Dr. Ingalls stood to shake his hand. "Good luck with SAC Biedermann," she said with a touch of sarcasm.

  He went to the door, trying to overcome his feeling of being dismissed, angry with himself for expecting anything different. She was watching him as she took the band off her ponytail and shook her hair loose, a disorderly blond fountain that covered her face for a moment before she brushed it quickly back into a more professional-looking coif.

  "I may need to consult with you again—" he began.

  "Certainly. I'll make every effort to accommodate whenever feasible. Just call Marze, and she'll schedule it."

  He felt shitty as he opened the door. But then she surprised him, calling, "I enjoyed our lunch, Mr.Ford." When he glanced back, she was briskly sorting papers at her desk. She didn't look at him, but he was glad to see her smile as she worked. Immediately he felt a lot better.

  9

  THE FBI MANHATTAN FIELD office was in the Federal Building, miles south of Dr. Ingalls's office. With a couple of hours to kill before the three o'clock meeting, Mo opted to drive down, leave the car in a lot near Chinatown, and walk the rest of the way to Federal Plaza. It was a good day to walk, not hot enough to work up a big sweat, and he had always liked this part of Manhattan. If you managed to step out from under the cloud of cynicism over your head, you could get off on the sheer diversity of human beings, the innumerable sizes and shapes and colors of them, the endlessly surprising things they did. Even the air, the piss smell of the masonry, the rotting-food aromas of garbage cans, the suffocating diesel belches of buses, seemed rich with nutrients he was sure fortified the blood.

  He bought a little bag of candied peanuts and munched them as he strolled. There was a lot he hadn't asked Dr. Ingalls. In fact, there was no guarantee that the things she or Biedermann could tell him about Ronald Parker would necessarily apply to a copycat. The copycat killer operated under yet another layer of psychological complexity, his close identification with a previous killer making it even harder to guess his motives and next moves.

  One of the things he'd have to get from Biedermann would be the really deep forensic details. A copycat could reasonably be expected to deviate from the original, if only because the new killer couldn't know everything about his role model's work. Mo's idea was to get a good sense of Ronald Parker, then focus on the new killer's departures from Parker's MO. The lab reports weren't in from the O'Connor murder, but so far he hadn't found any obvious departures. That is, unless the power station murder did prove to be the new killer, not just a previously undiscovered victim of Parker's. But whether by Parker or a copycat, the power station murder would be the first that didn't occur in the victim'sown home. That had to be significant. At the very least, fingerprints found on arranged objects could prove or disprove Mo's belief that the victims themselves had been forced to do the organizing.

  If they hadn't already caught Parker and Mo had been called in on the new murders, he'd have assumed they were done by the same guy. It all came down to how closely the MOs matched. If they were too much alike, you'd have to consider some troubling alternatives.

  Like what? A, the killer of O'Connor was the same guy who'd killed all the others, and Parker was the wrong guy. But they had Parker cold, the case against him was rock solid. So that would leave B, and this was kind of scary: Ronald Parker hadn't worked alone, and his accomplice was still out there, just now starting up again.

  Of course, there was C, a third alternative that could explain closely matching MOs. This struck Mo as less likely still but in a way more scary. It was a copycat situation, but the new killer had access to inside information about the Parker investigation. Or was involved in the investigation.

  He dodged a speed balling rollerblader, a tall black teenager who wore nothing but a G-string, iridescent green alien-eyeball shades, and Disc man headphones. The guy whipped down the sidewalk backward, graceful as Baryshnikov's shadow, weaving in and out between other pedestrians without looking, as if he had eyes in the back of his head.

  The interruption was good, Mo decided as he watched the dancing figure recede. With his idea of an insider doing the new killing, he was getting ahead of himself. Best to wait, hear what Biedermann had to tell him.

  His thoughts went back to Dr. Ingalls, Rebecca Ingalls, the nice buzz that had grown on him as they'd talked. He was being stupid, he decided, showing his vulnerability. He had long since decided that much of love was about marketability, about station. Everybody had an unconscious or at best barely conscious sense of their own marketability, of how desirable a partner they'd make. Maybe it was an assessment of looks, of sex appeal, of social class, of educational level, of how much money you had—an idea of yourself that you recognized when you glimpsed it in a prospective partner. You might hanker after somebody who was more marketable than you were, the way people got the hots for movie stars, but realistically you seldom went after those people. Relationships did occur between classes of overall desirability, but they seldom lasted. Because the partner who discerned he or she could do better would eventually try to do so.

  Is that what had happened with Carla? Mo's sense of their relative marketability was that he held his own with her in terms of looks and smarts, but she came from family money and in the last year with her career taking off she had begun to sense she had opportunities he didn't. Time to move up another notch in the relationship department.

  A pretty dismal view of love.

  So what did all that have to do with Dr.Ingalls? he chided himself. New York was full of attractive but, to Mo, inaccessible women. It was inappropriate even to put her in the"prospective" category, a sign of his desperation and heart-hunger. She had pulled it all up short when she'd felt their conversation veering too far toward the personal. She was a professional. More importantly, she also knew what her marketability quotient was, and that she could do better than Mo Ford. She saw that, he saw that, end of story.

  Feeling lousy again, Mo finished the peanuts, balled up the bag, tossed it at a trash canister, missed, retrieved it, and put it in. He had come up to Federal Plaza. Time to put on the act of being together and functional one more time.

  Biedermann's office was on the twenty-fifth floor, a regular palace compared to the institutional, gray-surfaced cubicles his underlings got. Still, the room was done in federal cutback-era utilitarian, with short-pile gray carpeting, a massive enameled metal desk, Steel case desk chair, a small Formica conference table with six plastic chairs. On a set o
f shelves, Biedermann had allowed himself the luxury of a few personal decorations: pictures of the SAC with Al Gore, with Colin Powell, with Governor Pataki, with others Mo didn't recognize. A couple of pistol-shooting trophies, a citation or two. A heavy, red-leather,chrome-studded dog collar, and a big bowie knife mounted on an engraved plaque.

  "You're wondering about the knife," Biedermann said. He was about two inches taller than Mo, with a military buzz cut gone white-blond, blue eyes in a tanned, strong-jawed face. His charcoal suit was well cut and made Mo envious, given that his only comparably stylish suit had been ruined by Big Willie.

  "What's the story?" Mo asked. The knife was obviously a routine icebreaker for Biedermann.

  "A joke. Used to work in Internal Affairs, out in the San Diego field office. You're never popular, understatement, when you're I A. So when I moved over to this job, the San Diego staff presented me with the knife. Said I'd stuck it in their backs long enough, I could keep it now."

  Mo chuckled dutifully. He thought to ask about the dog collar, but there was a rap on the door frame and three people came into the room. Two were members of Biedermann's staff, a woman and a man who, Biedermann explained, had worked on the howdy Doody task force, Special Agents Lisa Morris and Esteban Garcia. They both carried manila file folders, edges trimmed with the red and white stripes that meant they were active case files. The third person Biedermann introduced as Anson Zelek, a tall, thin man in his early sixties with a tight, triangular face, small mouth, up-tilted eyes. He looked vaguely familiar, and then Mo realized he resembled the typical representation of a Roswell alien. He wondered if the look resulted from a face-lift.

  Biedermann sat at the head of the table, Zelek off to one side of the room. Mo sat across from Morris and Garcia, savoring the draft of air-conditioning against the back of his neck. He asked them about the structure of the inter agency task force on the Howdy Doody case, and SA Lisa Morris listed the members: the FBI, the Manhattan and Bronx PDs, the New York DA's office, the New Jersey State and local cops. The Connecticut State Police and the Westchester DA's office had also been included because they wanted to be up to speed if the killer struck in their jurisdictions.

  Then it was Mo's turn. He told them what he knew so far about the O'Connor murder and filled them in on the power station corpse. When he mentioned that he'd just come from a meeting with Dr. Ingalls, Biedermann looked at him penetratingly, more than a little interested. Zelek's tilted almond eyes seemed to perk up, too.

  "She's very good, isn't she." Biedermann commented flatly.

  "Yes, I thought so," Mo said."But our appointment today was a short-notice thing, I didn't have the time to ask all the questions I wanted to."

  "What else did you want to know?"

  "Well, I asked her how Parker got caught, and she said it resulted from a proactive strategy on your part. But she didn't give me any details."

  The three agents at the table glanced at each other, and at Morris's questioning look Biedermann gave a little nod. He clearly intended to stay in charge of any information exchange here.

  Morris was a smallish woman with red hair in a practical cut, and she spoke with a slight Southern accent. "We had very little to go on, and our killer was hitting about once a month. By the time he'd killed his sixth, we were starting to get a lot of pressure for an arrest. The last several kills were in Manhattan, the mayor put pressure onus, Washington said we had to get proactive. All we knew at the time was that the perpetrator selected tallish, blond victims, and that his murders seemed to be about striking back at people who'd controlled him. Controlling them in return. So we established a likely victim. It was a long shot that he'd notice. We got lucky, and I mean that sincerely." Again she gave Biedermann a look, a checkup: You sure this is okay?

  Mo felt obliged to break in. "I understood he killed people he'd encountered, but that nobody ever figured out how he acquired them all. How could you place someone in his way?"

  Biedermann dipped his chin, and SA Morris went on, "Our profile suggested the perpetrator would follow press reports about his case, that public response to his crimes was one of his motivations. So we engineered a public relations effort. We identified a tallish, blond person we could set up through crafted news reports as a controlling figure, hoping he'd want to retaliate. As I said, we got lucky. We had the intended vic's apartment under surveillance, and when Parker came in, we were there."

  It was beginning to come clear for Mo. Jesus. No wonder she hadn't wanted to talk about this part of it. No wonder she'd pulled away so fast.

  "You used Dr.Ingalls," he said.

  Biedermann took over. "She's arising star in the field, she'd just published a book that was getting her name in the news anyway. So, with her cooperation, we sether up in a series of articles. 'Super shrink closes in on Howdy Doody killer,' that kind of thing. 'FBI confident profiler will reveal killer's identity.' He had to feel manipulated by her. We scripted her press comments very, very carefully, framing her view of him in terms that would feel condescending, challenging, manipulative. He took the bait. We were lucky."

  Mo thought about that for a moment. It had to have been scary as hell for Dr. Ingalls to walk around every day knowing she might be being procured by a very effective, sadistic serial killer. He asked, "So how'd it go down at the end?"

  This time Biedermann nodded minutely to Garcia. Like Morris, Garcia was dressed perfectly, crisp white shirt, tie, dark suit. He was a barrel-chested man with a pronounced widow's peak, and as he talked, he gestured with thick, ring-encrusted fingers. "I was in tactical charge of the apprehension unit. By the time we had Dr. Ingalls in position, we knew his rhythm pretty well, knew within several days when he'd try again. We never did spot him as he picked her up, and we never saw him approach the building. Uh, but we had given her a wrist alarm, one of these Lifeline things, that she could press if anything happened, would ring at our end. And one night there he is, a guy walks into her bedroom, he's tall and blond and he's carrying a black duffel. She, uh, she activated her wrist alarm, fought with him, but he saw us starting to move in. We're not sure how he got away from the scene—" Garcia hesitated uncomfortably.

  Mo was thinking, Another FBI bungle.

  "We can talk blame for a few mistakes," Biedermann broke in, "or we can talk credit, well-deservedaccolades, for setting it up, for protecting Dr.Ingalls, and for catching him." He gave Mo a challenging glance, then nodded for Garcia to continue. "Give us the nutshell version, how about, Esteban?"

  "He had only been with her for a few minutes, she wasn't badly hurt. When he evaded us at our perimeter, we gave a holler to the NYPD, and a black-and-white spotted him several blocks away."

  "Good interagency cooperation," Biedermann put in, still watching Mo. Sitting back from the table, Zelek crossed his legs and looked mildly amused.

  Garcia finished, "He resisted arrest before being subdued. In the car we found extra nylon handcuffs, a cordless drill, a pruning shears, the ice tongs, latex gloves, a whole roll of the fishline."

  Mo looked at the three of them, and they watched him just as closely."Fish line," he said finally.

  They caught each other's eyes.

  "Not exactly fishline," Biedermann said. "A heavy-gauge poly line a lot like fish line."

  "To be precise, a lawn-trimmer line," Mo said. "Serrated to cut weeds better."

  "Well,yes," Morris admitted.

  "But fishline was what you told people. What you told the press."

  "Public relations issues are paramount in a case like this," Biedermann said. "Every detail has to be managed, or the whole investigation will get out of control."

  "I understand," Mo told him, disliking him. Control was a bugaboo for Biedermann just as much as for Howdy Doody. Him and Flannery both, very different styles of getting things done but both big guys with big ambitions. He wondered briefly how the SAC and the DA had gotten along on the first task force, and how it was going to feel to be an investigator caught between those two jumbo-size
egos.

  Biedermann continued, "Which brings us to something we'll have to get sorted out right from the start, Detective. We've had experience with this kind of thing, at the national level. If you've got a copycat up in White Plains, a prolific, highly organized, and mobile killer, we're going to have to have a very solid command structure for the investigation. My office will have to have undisputed authority for task force strategy. We'll completely respect your prerogatives, but you'll have to respect ours."

  Mo nodded. "I do. Absolutely. I really do. That's why I'm here. So as a first step in our cooperation, I'll need the whole story, copies of all the files, scene photos, pathology reports.And," he said as Biedermann started to speak,"you can expect the same from us. Right now, I'm curious about how closely the copycat parallels the original. If it is a copycat. And I'd like to start with a couple of details that should tell us that right away. What do we know about the handcuffs?"

  Morris glanced to Biedermann, and at his nod said, "They were found on most of the bodies. Standard police equipment, Flex-Cuf brand disposable nylon, twenty-two inches long when new but clipped short on Howdy Doody's victims. No way to trace them—they're the brand of choice of about two thousand police departments nationwide, they're cheap, and their use isn't monitored. Plus, anyone can buy them in bulk from Gall's police supply by mail order. As you know, they're easy to slip on quickly, so we theorized he used them right away to get control of his victims. This was verified by Dr. Ingalls's,um, her, uh, experience. Once their hands were useless, he could take the time to do the more elaborate ligature knotting."