Puppets Read online

  Good? Mo thought, she's brought us to the real issue. "Yeah, let's talk about that. The knots."

  Morris had been holding her files in her lap, and as Mo spoke, she unconsciously pulled the folders against her chest, glancing at Biedermann for a cue.

  Mo didn't wait for Biedermann's answer. He reached over, caught Morris by surprise, jerked the files out of her grip. He quickly opened one to find a photo montage of a minor holocaust: bodies hanging on walls, bodies contorted on gurneys, close-ups of temple wounds and skin lacerations, autopsy shots.

  Zelek's almond eyes narrowed suddenly. None of the agents moved, but Biedermann lowered his voice a half an octave. "I don't think your approach is called for, Detective."

  Mo was flipping through the photos and found what he was looking for, a catalog of knots, photographed at close range against the discolored skin of the victims. The photos were arranged in rows in fold-out, clear plastic envelopes, each row neatly labeled and displaying seven sets of knots for easy comparison. Yes, there was the distinctive line, the sharp-seamed weed-whacker poly. It would cut the skin more than a smooth fish line, grip better when wet with sweat or blood. It would hurt more and beget quicker response to thepuppeteer's commands.

  And, yes, the knots were consistent. The one that had actually tightened around the limb of the victim was an odd type of slipknot, where the line passed twice through a loop of itself and was then secured with three or four wraps—sort of a miniature noose, only doubled. The other was a complicated thing that occurred in the middle of the wrist lines, obviously designed to lengthen or shorten the line as needed. Mo didn't precisely remember the knots he'd seen at O'Connor's house or at the power station, but at a glance he could see these were similar.

  If the knots did match, this was going to be a real shit hole of a case. Because whatever else might have been made public in the course of the Howdy Doody investigation, the details of ligature knotting weren't. A close match here would signal that they had the wrong guy in Parker, or that Parker had had a partner who was now off on his own.

  Or that the new killer had deep access to police or FBI files and was deliberately using Parker's MO to challenge or confound investigators. Thinking about it now, Mo decided the insider theory was looking stronger. The odds of the killer going for the trap they'd set were improbably long. That they had even attempted using Rebecca as a positioned victim suggested that they'd known they were trying to lure an insider.

  Mo shut the folder and tossed it back toward Biedermann. Morris and Garcia just waited, not sure how to react. One of the limitations of a micromanaged shop, Mo thought. It destroys initiative.

  "Okay,"Biedermann said. "You've established that you're an asshole, and that you think we're assholes, too." His face had a wearily baleful look. "But let's step back a bit and try to regroup here. Let's try to get objective. If there's a close parallel between Howdy Doody and your new guy, yes, one of the obvious suspicions would be that the killer has some kind of inside access to information. In which case, you can understand why we're so leery of letting everybody know every detail. It has nothing to do with what you perceive as our lack of respect for regional police jurisdictions. It's about limiting the circle of people with access to the information.

  Without that, we'll never be able to figure how anyone got information, if indeed they did. You agree?"

  "Yep," Mo said.

  "So the way this is gonna work is as follows. First, on the basis of the similarities between the new crimes and the Howdy Doody killings, this office is declaring presumptive jurisdiction. Second, you don't get copies of everything. You want to compare knots, you can bring your photos down here and compare them on site. Same with pathology reports. Same with scene photos that show the arrangements. Same with any detail I choose to restrict access to. You accept that only the lead desk knows the whole story, and that's here, that's us. You play your part, but you don't try to do more than your part."

  Mo started to object, but Biedermann held up his hand. "I talked to your supervisor after you first called on this. Says Morgan Ford's real good, but he likes to be a lone wolf, he's got reprimands in his file, he causes trouble for his outfit. We don't want that in this investigation, Ford. So you want to play macho here, go fuck yourself. I snap my fingers, someone more amenable takes over and you're out. This office will cooperate fully—within an effective command structure for the investigation. So will yours. You don't like that, again, go fuck."

  Everyone got tense, except Zelek, who was looking mostly bored. Mo's testosterone kicked in for an instant, but it was followed quickly by the who gives a shit hormone. Yeah, he'd like to catch Howdy II, save the world from the latest menace. But it wasn't his sole responsibility. This was a job, not a crusade, and a job he had serious doubts about. Biedermann was an asshole, but only one of many, and you couldn't let them all bend you out of shape.

  And anyway, Biedermann was right about this.

  Mo shrugged. "Sounds good," he said cheerfully. "So I'll be down here tomorrow with some details on the new White Plains and Buchanan murders. I'd like access to your files. Two o'clock be okay?"

  He was happy to see that his sanguine approach rankled with Biedermann. The SAC's poise slipped just a bit, a pout on his pursed lips, as he saw the goad in Mo's attitude. Zelek was looking at him speculatively. Morris and Garcia just watched their boss, uncertain.

  10

  IT WAS FOUR-THIRTY by the time Mo left the Federal Building and burst with relief into the air of Manhattan rush hour. The streets had filled with pedestrians and cars and buses, and a mood of eager and irritable desperation had come over the city. Hard day, get home, run for cover, kick back. For once Mo wasn't in a comparable hurry.

  Before leaving the FBI offices, he'd made a call to Ty Boggs to let him know he was loose and on his day. Then had arranged earlier to meet at Ty's favorite Vietnamese restaurant, Pho Bang, over on East Broadway at Mott Street. Ty had to come over from his precinct house in the Bronx, which gave Mo half an hour to cover just a few blocks. So he took his time. He watched with amusement as a rip roaring procession of fire trucks tried to get through the traffic, sirens warbling and horns blatting as they stood like everybody else, pinned by gridlock. Everything motionless, and yet the street was a bedlam panic of red lights, massive glistening vehicles with roaring motors and bellowing sirens. Despite the air of urgency, a relentless stream of oblivious pedestrians slipped between the bumpers of the stationary behemoths. New Yorkers.

  Paradoxically, the meeting with Biedermann had cheered him up. Dr. Ingalls had been right about how the SAC would want to crowd Mo and the NYSP out. But Biedermann's pushy attitude, the silent spooky presence of Anson Zelek, whoever he was, along with Flannery's machinations: It was all a good reminder to keep his distance from his job. For the moment he was feeling pleasantly disconnected from the whole thing.

  The wall of roaring machines finally managed to move, and Mo kept walking. He was looking forward to seeing Ty, maybe he could shed some light on some of the undercurrents here. At the very least, he might help figure out ways around or through Biedermann.

  Mo knew Tyndale Boggs from classes they'd both attended at city College eighteen years ago. Ty was older, having served in Vietnam before continuing college. He was a lieutenant in the Bronx PD now, while Mo was still just a State Police investigator, at a sergeant's pay scale. Ty claimed he owed his promotions to being African American at the right time and place and having a name that more or less combined the names of two great baseball players, but wasn't't true. He got there by being smart and capable and a bulldog on the case. He was in his mid fifties, a sturdily built guy with the face of a martyr, all the world's troubles etched into two deep horizontal lines in his forehead. Divorced now, he lived with his sister and her two kids. In Vietnam he'd been shot through the cheek, in one side and out the other, and it had left scars and some ongoing dental problems. He and Mo were pretty close for a while but had drifted apart in the last few years, Mo
wasn't sure why.

  Mo got to Pho Bang before Ty did, taking a table near the front and ordering an iced lychee-nut tea to tide him over. It was just five, a little early for the dinner rush, and the place was mostly empty. When Ty came through the door, he moved into the room like the shadow of a rain cloud, dark and a little menacing. Mo thought he'd aged a lot since he'd last seen him, six months ago.

  Ty pulled back a chair and put himself in it, already slouching before his pants hit the seat. "Hey,"he said.

  "Looking good," Mo told him.

  Ty grunted and grabbed a menu. Mo took it as a cue to look at his own.

  "I just spent an hour and a half with your buddy Biedermann," Mo said after a few minutes. He had explained the Howdy Doody copycat when he'd first called.

  "Lucky guy," Ty said. He grabbed a handful of chow mein noodles from the bowl in front of him, tipped his head back, poured them into his mouth. A waiter came to put ice water and a teapot on the table.

  "Fun to work with?" Mo asked. At Ty's flat-eyed look, he asked,"You think it's just his style, or has he got a particular bug up his butt about Howdy Doody?"

  "Both."

  Ty was often surly and closemouthed, but this was extreme even for him, Mo decided."Hey, Ty," he said, "if this is a bad day for you to talk about this stuff, we could—"

  "Nah." Ty brushed the idea away with the back of his hand. "It's just Howdy Doody wasn't a lot of fun, I'd just as soon not deal with it anymore than I have to. I'll do what I have to to see it to trial and then be glad to see its backside."

  "What was so bad?Biedermann?"

  "Biedermann's a dick head, yeah, but there's other stuff, complex, made it hard to work the case. I like my serial killers neat."

  "You want to tell me?"

  But the waiter had come back. They both ordered. Mo chose a bowl of noodle soup, Ty several dishes he ordered in Vietnamese. Two smartly dressed young couples came in and took one of the circular tables.

  Ty waited until the waiter was back in the kitchen. "Yeah,I'll tell you, but it's all pretty vague. I'm not sure what the shit is." His face took on a perplexed look, forehead lines turning into crevasses. "There's something working behind the scenes. Everybody knows it, nobody knows what it is. I mean, besides the thing with Biedermann and the shrink, that profiler they brought in."

  Mo felt a stab of some strong emotion."What was that?" he croaked.

  "It was understood, you didn't mention it, but sometimes it complicated things to pretend it didn't interfere. Not technically professional misconduct, I don't think, she's a civilian. Good-looking, can't blame Biedermann. Not sure if they're still an item, but him pressuring her to be used for bait, that had to put some kind of strain on 'em." Ty poured himself a cup of steaming tea and gulped down the tiny cupful in one scalding swallow. He set the cup down and frowned at the pot.

  That explained a lot about Biedermann's and Dr. Ingalls's attitudes toward each other, Mo thought. He agreed with Ty: If they were still an item, it was strained. Serial killers did that to you. But whatever their current relationship, he couldn't deny that, yeah, they'd make a good match: two big, handsome, confident, Anglo-looking, upwardly mobile professionals. Real equality in the marketability factor there. He felt an irrational disappointment and hated himself for it.

  "What else?" he prodded.

  "There's something with the investigation, like another layer that we're not supposed to know about. You'd see it all the time, the way information would be shared or mostly not shared. The way Biedermann would put a lid on this line of inquiry or that and meanwhile be whipping your ass for progress in another area. I tried to figure it out, then just said what the fuck, what do I care, I'll just domy bit, close the case and get out. Another thing, one day I'm chatting up this girl down in Human Resources, and she mentions Biedermann requested my personnel file. Not just me, turns out, he looked at job files of everybody in the NYPD who worked on the case. So I talk to Tommy MacArthur, he's my counterpart on the Newark side, and Biedermann did the same with them. We're wondering why he's so interested in our backgrounds. I ask, 'Can this guy just do that?' and the answer apparently is, yes, he's got some special clearance."

  "The possibility of the inside link," Mo said. Yet another indication that's what they were thinking. It was one possible explanation for Biedermann's attitude, especially given his background in internal Affairs.

  "Maybe, but dig this," Ty said, shaking his head and picking up some heat on the subject. "About nine months ago I had to go back for some oral surgery, about the tenth time over the years? So I'm back and forth with the vets administration for my records, you know, they're supposed to cover this shit, I got these bone chips in the gums and over in my mastoid. They sit there fine for a few years, then they decide to move around, give me pain." Ty grimaced and rubbed his jaw."So I call up Records, I know some of the people there pretty well by now, and this VA guy says, 'Hey, Boggs, yeah, I just got a request for your records the other day.' I'm thinking who the fuck, he tells me it's FBI, as a federal agency they have access. And I'm wondering why the hell Biedermann's going to go back twenty-seven years before he's gonna trust me to do my job, not have a sideline as a serial killer. And this from a guy knows damn well niggers don't do serial."

  It was a fact that almost all serial killers were white, Mo reflected, almost none African-American. He could understand Ty's resentment. Biedermann's caution did seem excessive.

  "Any ideas why he's thinking that way? What he's looking for?"

  Ty shrugged. He took another cup of tea, this time swishing it through his teeth like a mouthwash.

  They sat like that for a while, Ty sprawled in his chair, both of them watching as the restaurant began to pick up a few customers. One of the newcomers was a young Vietnamese woman who loitered near the register, obviously waiting for someone. She was wearing high heels and a short black dress that showed off her legs, the most exquisitely shapely legs Mo could ever recall seeing in his life. With her dark hair and slim figure, she reminded him just a little of Carla, and looking at her, he felt the bottom fall out, all the hopeless tender yearnings of a lifetime suddenly catching up. Like he had a hole where his heart was supposed to be. To make it worse, after a few minutes a comparably handsome young man came in, and the way the woman's eyes lit up broke Mo's heart. The guy wore pleated black pants and a white shirt with blousy sleeves, a Vietnamese Valentino. They kissed hungrily before going to a table, and their pleasure in seeing each other was too much to take, Mo had to look away.

  But then, welcome distraction, the waiter brought their food. Mo's was a bowl the size of his bathroom sink, a nest of noodles in steaming broth mixed with slices of beef and whole shrimp and topped with a pile of cilantro and mint and basil leaves. Ty lined up his several dishes in front of him and went at it with his chopsticks, a man who knew how to eat.

  "So how's Carla?" Ty asked between bites.

  "I'm single," Mo said.

  Ty's face twitched, but he didn't stop eating. "You knew it was coming. For like the whole last year."

  "Yeah. But if it's not your idea, you're never quite ready for it."

  "Got any other irons in the fire?"

  Mo shook his head.

  "Me, I don't even try when I'm in an oral surgery phase," Ty confided. "I'm enough of a son of a bitch even without it, nobody should have to put up with me."

  Mo couldn't argue with that. Instead he concentrated on eating. The soup was delicious, the vegetables crisp and the mix of flavors always surprising.

  After another long silence Ty said, "A couple times, at the task force meetings, there'd be some guys Biedermann didn't introduce. Usually it was this gray-faced guy, quiet—"

  "The alien? I just met him. Name's Anson Zelek."

  "The alien, yeah. When I saw that guy, my first thought was Washington. Then I thought, hey, Biedermann's office is on the twenty-fifth floor?That's the National Security floor. So I figure, the way Biedermann runs us like puppets, I think he's a
puppet, too. Like somebody further up is pulling his strings,that's why he's such a hard-ass method man." Ty crammed a bite of rolled and stuffed beef into his mouth and chewed carefully.

  An interesting irony, Mo thought: Takes a puppeteer to catch a puppeteer. Ty's take on Zelek sounded about right: some Washington-level spook type. In Mo's experience with the FBI, it wasn't that unusual to have some outside agent sitting in, usually when a case involved supervisory issues or possible links to other investigations, often RICO cases. Another thought occurred to him: "Was the Westchester DA at any of the task force meetings?"

  "Yeah, Flannery, him or one of his assistants. Another asshole. If the new guy's killing in Westchester, Flannery will be all over it, won't he? Oh, you lucky boy."

  Mo thought of another question: "So who's pulling Biedermann's strings? Zelek?"

  Ty shrugged again. Halfway through his meal now, and sometimes he winced as he chewed."Who knows? And, hey, Mo, who really cares? You want my advice, if this copycat turns into another big one, just fall in line, do your part. Why worry about what Biedermann's got cooking?"

  Ty was getting cranky again, and Mo decided not to press for details just now. "Do me a favor, though," Mo said. "Let me look at your files? Talk to me about the case as we go?"

  Ty gave him the flat-eyed look. "Sometimes I think you look for trouble, so help me. I never did figure out why. Speaking as a looey myself, I don't envy Marsden. You're a real asshole sometimes."