Puppets

by Daniel Hecht

  He gave them the story. Neighbor kid was playing in the yard next door, threw a Frisbee into the back yard of 1431, came to get it, saw something through the window, went home crying. Mother took a peek, went home crying, too, called 911. From her glimpse through the window, the mother next door identified the corpse as Daniel O'Connor, owner of the house.

  "So how come you want us here, Jim?" Mo asked.

  Melrose just gestured with his chin and led them back through the house. Nice place, Mo decided, furnished with wicker chairs and Durie rugs and natural wood tables from Pier 1and the Pottery Barn. As always, he had the uncomfortable sensation of being a voyeur, the little kinky charge that came from walking around uninvited in a stranger's house. Looking so closely. Seeing the way other people lived, so much like the way you lived yet so different. Different food smells, different body odors, unfamiliar faces in photos, the kind of books you'd never read. Maybe for burglars this kind of trespass was more fun, but in a death house everything seemed frozen in time, abandoned. Bad things had happened here, nightmarish things that still echoed in the quiet rooms.

  "It's freezing in here," St. Pierre complained. And Mo realized he was right, it was mid seventies outside and was barely in the low sixties in here.

  "Yah,"Melrose said. "I noticed it, too. There's a thermostat in the living room, central air, set as low as it can go."

  Which would be good for preserving the corpse, Mo thought. But it was only mid-May, not yet that hot, so why would O'Connor have wanted it so cold? Or had the killer set it?

  From the living room they went into a central hallway and glanced into a cheerful kitchen: black-and-white tile floor, little round table with an open newspaper and a coffee cup. They passed a small bathroom and then at the back of the house went into a large room that made up the rest of the ground floor. Low-pile, green carpeting, a Stair Master, a little weight rack, a bicycle and kayak up on hooks on the right wall, a television, a computer desk and CD player. Obviously O'Connor had used this as a combination exercise-utility-office room. Brightly lit by a pair of big windows and a louvered glass door that led out into the backyard. A couple of other White Plains guys were there. Mo didn't see the body until Melrose gestured for him to turn around.

  Yes, it was one you weren't likely to forget.

  O'Connor had red-blond hair, a boyish face and freckled arms and shoulders, a good build. He was naked and suspended upright by some kind of cord that was tied to his ankles and knees, elbows and wrists and neck, and ran up to nine steel eyelets sunk into the wall. In addition to the polyline, a disposable-type nylon handcuff hung from each wrist. His head and shoulders lolled forward and his weight was equally supported by his arms, up at head height, and his legs, with the ankles drawn up and knees bent sharply. A marionette on strings. His skin was a sick, purplish white except for where the cord had trapped blood and where postmortem lividity had stained the lower surfaces of his body bright, mottled red. Aside from the coloration changes and ligature indentations, the body seemed at first unmarked. Then Mo spotted two small wounds in O'Connor's hair, one just above each ear. Dried blood, not much, had run and clotted below the wounds, crisping the short blond curls.

  Mo scanned the room, looked back to O'Connor, looked around the room again, trying to map things in his head before it got any crazier here. Within minutes, the White Plains CSU van would come, Marsden and others from the BCI would show up, there'd be photographers and forensic technicians and the medical examiner's people. There'd be photo flashes and vacuums running and people dusting for prints, and all the activity would change the way the room looked and felt. Patterns that might register subconsciously would be lost, the overview smothered in details.

  He sniffed delicately in the direction of the corpse and caught only the faintest odor of ripe meat. When he pushed the head gently, it resisted, suggesting that the body retained rigor. The air-conditioning would have arrested decay somewhat, but taken together both were signs O'Connor hadn't been dead that long. From this close, he could see that the line used to suspend the body was not a heavy poly fishline, as he'd first thought, but the sharp-edged, serrated cord used for weed-whackers.

  Melrose was keeping his distance, as if what had killed O'Connor might be catching. Mike St. Pierre stood well back, too, not so enthusiastic now.

  With the big windows directly opposite the corpse on the wall, the drapes pulled all the way apart and the ceiling lights on, it was clear the body had deliberately been displayed—a spectacle just waiting for someone to find it. Mo took a turn through the room, but he already knew what he'd find. On a side table he saw an arrangement of objects organized in geometric patterns: a pair of folded sunglasses, bracketed by two gardening gloves. Above them, a collection of pens arranged in a neat zigzag line with coins placed in each angle. A couple of stacks of music CDs, perfectly squared with the edge of the table, with an empty Gatorade bottle on top of each stack. At the computer desk, diskettes had been lined up side by side all the way around the keyboard, and a cork bulletin board had been arranged with similar precision, postcards and cartoons and jotted notes arrayed down the center in a symmetrical pattern surrounded by triangles outlined in colored thumbtacks. A compulsive symmetry. Once you noticed it, the arrangement of all the room's little things took on an eerie subliminal geometry, scary, like seeing the diamonds on a rattlesnake down in the grass, or the hourglass on a black widow spider.

  "You like the designs?" Melrose asked. "Bedroom's the same way."

  Mo's head had begun to ache again, and he could feel all the muscle pulls and bruises distinctly. He was thinking, If only I had made it to the desk and had signed out for sick leave. Just like two or three minutes head start, and somebody else would have gotten this.

  "You recognize this, Mike?" he asked St. Pierre.

  "Looks just like that guy, what do they call him, the control freak—"

  "Yeah." Mo wondered if Mike understood what that meant.

  The New Jersey State Police had begun calling him Howdy Doody, after the famous TV puppet of the 1950s. The first murders with the distinctive signature of strings tied to limbs and ritualized arrangements of objects had begun early in 1999. Three people killed in northern New Jersey, then three in Manhattan and another in the Bronx in a thirteen-month period, the remorselessly accelerating rhythm of kills typical of serial murderers. Mo knew Ty Boggs, who'd headed up the Bronx end of the investigation and was part of the inter jurisdictional task force, and they'd talked a little about the crimes. But Ty had been stingy with details. As with every serial spree, the police and FBI had kept many specifics of the crimes out of general knowledge. This had the several goals of discouraging the killer from changing his habits and maybe camouflaging his style, of being able to weed out bogus confessions, and of being able to differentiate between murders by the original artiste and future copycat crimes.

  Serial murder was the most horrendous and most difficult kind to solve. It was horrible because the habits of the killer, the repetition of certain types of torment or mutilation, spoke of some unfathomable sickness in the psyche, of a mind infested by demons that demanded a specific ritual. As did the motivation: The act of killing itself was the killer's objective, not particularly the end result.

  If you thought about that, it could mess you up inside.

  The difficulty in catching serial killers arose from the fact that unlike with most crimes the victims were not linked to the murderer by a web of interpersonal contacts, normal motivation, or cause and effect. Serial killers came from outside their victims' social spheres, so you couldn't nail them by establishing links between people with typical motives like jealousy or greed or revenge. Usually, the only connection was to be found in the psychology of the murderer, the compulsions or delusions or fears or hungers that drove him to kill. You had to inspect the psychological implications of each death, explore the symbolic narratives in excruciating detail.

  Getting that far into the mind of multiple murderers was not h
ealthy, either.

  And all that aside, Mo thought, from a strictly professional standpoint there were other things that made this one a prospective nightmare. The administrative complexity of tying your work to an ongoing investigation by the FBI and other police agencies, the inter jurisdictional task forces and the resulting increase in paperwork, conflicts of authority, and rivalry for leads and evidence and glory. The DA would want in on this, big time. There'd be publicity and publicity-seeking and political pressure, and scapegoating when things didn't gowell.

  And one other problem as well, Moreminded himself.

  Melrose brought itup before he said it: "Yeah, the control nut, the Howdy Doodykiller. But they caught that guy, three-four months ago. Down in the city."

  Mo looked at O'Connor, dead and grotesquely serene on the wall like the limp Jesus of the pieta.

  Then he heard people in the hall, and there was Angelo Antonelli, the deputy medical examiner. Behind him came Marsden, and then a jump suited woman carrying a big aluminum equipment case, and a couple of other evidence techs. And then it was just time to rock and roll.

  4

  "YO, MO, " ANGELO SAID brightly. "Hey, I was just looking at X your pal, what'd you guys call him—Big Willie. They gonna give you grief or what?" He winked at Marsden and said for his benefit, "Tell you what I'll do, I'll sign off it was accidental death. Hit his head in the tub or something."

  "Not funny," Marsden said."Don't even joke about that." The irritated skin next to his nose was bright red and looked painful.

  Mo saw Angelo once in a while over drinks over at The Edge, and before his relationship with Carla had turned into a minefield they'd even gotten together a couple of times with Angelo and his girlfriend as a foursome. He was small and wiry, dark-haired, with the luscious big eyes and long, dark lashes of a stereotypical Italian Renaissance lover. His job was slicing up people who'd been killed by all kinds of gruesome means; he worked in a labyrinth of gray tile floors with drains in them, brushed-chrome refrigerators, and savage-looking medical equipment. You'd expect him to be ghoulish, secretive, but in fact Angelo loved his job, loved his customers and his colleagues, maintained a relentlessly cheerful disposition. He was an avid whistler and often peeled off cheerful ditties as he burrowed into the abdominal cavities or brain cases of murder and accident victims.

  When he saw O'Connor, Angelo's face registered a look of surprise and gleeful anticipation. By his seriously nasty look, Marsden recognized the Howdy Doody MO and the problems this would entail.

  Angelo and his assistant looked over the body. Angelo was a stickler for detail, using a hand held tape recorder to record his observations here just as he would dictate what he saw and did back at the morgue when he got around to cutting. They took an air temperature reading and a basal body reading, tested the degree of rigor, measured the area of lividity patches, picked at spots of dried blood and saved it in glassine envelopes, went over every inch of skin with an illuminated magnifier, bagging up hairs, fibers, dandruff, dirt.

  At last they put paper bags over the hands and with Mo's help cut the body down and lowered it onto a gurney. The assistant bagged the cut-off lines and nylon handcuffs as they came free. It was an awkward process, figuring how to keep O'Connor in place until all the cords were cut and then manhandling an inert, 170-pound, naked adult male who was frozen in such a position. The neck cord was really slicing into the creased skin there. Angelo supervised as the three of them leaned and strained: "There . . . Hold it! . . .Wait—there, now push a little. Lift . . . Lemme just get—no, hold it!" Mo had felt the curiously heavy, pliant stiffness of corpses before, but this was particularly unsettling. Dancing with a dead man. When they cut the wires holding the wrists, the arms dropped forward a few inches and bobbed on the remaining elasticity of their sinews, like somebody playing monster to scare some kitchened they laid him on his back on the gurney, he kept that same position, head still forward and held well off the pad, arms up at head height, and worst of all, legs up at the spread knees and heels not quite touching the pad. They put a sheet over him, but the contorted, clutching tented shape was in some ways worse.

  Photographers began to shoot the scene, still and video, a sketch artist mapped the room, and the trace techs went at the surfaces. St. Pierre went out to talk to the uniforms and the neighbors, and as the techs continued their work, Marsden took Mo aside. They went into the kitchen, where the geometric arrangements were in evidence on all the counters. Mo put on a fresh pair of gloves and poked cautiously around in drawers and cabinets. Marsden stood glowering out the window over the sink.

  "So we've got a copycat,"Marsden said. "Starting up here in White Plains."

  "Looks that way."

  "Your sick leave is canceled."

  "I figured." Mo opened the refrigerator, looked at plastic-wrapped cold cuts, a bag of carrots, bottles of Heineken, milk, OJ. Typical stuff. The killer had not done his hyper compulsive arranging in the fridge.

  Marsden said, "I know Biedermann a little, he's the FBI's guy running the Howdy Doody investigation. Manhattan field office. You'll need to get in touch with him. Also the other members of the first task force, see what they can tell you about the original. I understand the feds called in an outside consultant to work with Behavioral Sciences, a shrink in Manhattan, you might want to consult with him."

  Mo used his pen to lift the edge of a pot holder, peered underneath. "Maybe they've got the wrong person, we're dealing with the original here?"

  "Caught him red-handed, the way I heard it." Marsden watched Mo for a moment, standing with his arms crossed and resting on his big belly. "Why's it so cold in here?" he complained.

  "Central air-conditioning. Somebody turned it all the way down. Not bad for our purposes, but I'm wondering why." Mo opened another drawer, found the kitchen utensils, and bent close to stir his pen through potato peelers, knives, kitchen shears. Probably the killer had brought his own gear, but it would be good to bag up every likely tool in the house, look for residues of the plastic line, prints, maybe some DNA.

  "The bitch is," Marsden said, "that the first guy got into a rhythm of about once a month toward the end. We don't know how the new guy will do it. But if we've got something like this to deal with once a month, it's going to be a shitty summer." The Si's voice had gotten thoughtful, almost sad-sounding. "There's another thing for me, I haven't mentioned this to anybody, I've been having this heart stuff took a stress test last week, where they put you on a treadmill?Flunked it, I've got a congestive problem in the coronary arteries, they're gonna do an angiogram on me, end of the month. But if I have to get a bypass, I'll miss a lot of time or maybe even get moved to some other department. Plus in the meantime I've got to avoid stress, anxiety, overwork, that shit. Like that's a possibility. Supposed to lose weight, quit smoking, too."

  Mo looked at Marsden. This was an unprecedented level of intimacy, and he wondered what the senior investigator was leading up to."Jesus. I'm sorry, Frank. I have to say, you've been hiding it well. I mean, you look good—"

  "Bullshit."

  "Okay. You don't look any worse than usual."

  Marsden grinned sourly "I've been thinking who's gonna stand in for me as unit coordinator. St. Pierre's out, too new. Paderewski's okay, but she doesn't get along with half the guys. Benoit, he's dumb as a stump, I don't know how he ever got in here, and Estey and Valsangiacomo just like guns and cars, they're not good with paper or people. Then there's Mo Ford, he's the smartest of the bunch, got the best solverate, but can't stay out of trouble and he's earned some enemies. Maybe his commitment to a career isn't what it has to be for unit coordinator, maybe he doesn't have the patience to do things by the book. Maybe his personal life gets in the way? So you can see what I'm up against." Marsden gestured toward the door, the back of the house where O'Connor's body had hung. "And then this . . . thing . . . has to come up, just to put more pressure on."

  Mo heard the backhanded flattery, surprised at how good it felt, impressed by
Marsden's insight about his personal life, which Mo had made a point of never mentioning. He was thinking of a way to answer when Marsden gestured with his chin to the window. Outside, a pair of dark cars had pulled up, and Mo recognized the big form of District Attorney Flannery getting out with a couple of his investigative assistants.

  Marsden heaved himself away from the edge of the counter. "Getting on four, I gotta go talk to Biedermann about how they handled public relations on the Howdy Doody kills, then talk to the mayor. I'll leave you and Flannery to have a tete-a-tete. What's your next step?"

  "I'll finish up here, talk to the White Plains people about getting a canvass going in the neighborhood. Then I'll pull up the files on Howdy Doody. I want to see just how close this guy is to the original, how they profiled him, what resources are online for a related crime. Then I'll see if I can get Angelo to expedite the autopsy."

  "Yeah,"Marsden said dejectedly. "Okay. Give me an update on Monday." He went to the living room door, scratching unconsciously at the raging skin next to his nose and watching the techs at work. "The first guy got seven before they caught him. Seven." He caught Mo's eye meaningfully. "Town the size of White Plains, this new guy could depopulate the place. have to change the population figures on the city-limits signs, huh?"A weary attempt at humor. Also a plea: Mo, do this right for once. And catch the son of a bitch soon.

  When the DA came into the murder room, his eyebrows went up and his blue eyes took on a look as he saw the Howdy Doody MO and his wheels started to turn. Everybody liked to be on hand for something "with hair on it," a significant murder scene, but political animals saw it through a different lens, did different calculations.

  Flannery spent sometime talking to the White Plains investigators, then came over to Mo. Mo told him his take on it so far and about the next steps he and Marsden had discussed. Flannery nodded thoughtfully, his eyes never leaving the body of Daniel O'Connor, which Angelo had uncovered at his request. When Mo was done, Flannery tipped his head toward the backyard. "How about we have a chat outside, Detective."