Puppets

by Daniel Hecht

  Mo realized that this level of self-esteem was not going to sustain him through the forthcoming meetings with high-powered shrinks and successful G-men. He made an effort to pump himself back up.

  He missed the Ninety-sixth Street exit and had to continue on down to seventy-ninth, where he got off and headed back up through the little streets, delayed by street repairs. But then the gods of Manhattan bestowed one of their quixotic little miracles, the sudden appearance of a parking place just where he needed it, and he got to the appointment with Dr. Ingalls on time.

  Dr. Rebecca Ingalls's office was on the fourth floor of an elegant older building with marble floors and a big elevator of walnut and polished brass. He found the office door open and went in to find the secretary he'd talked to on the phone. A little sign on her desk told him her name was Marie Devereaux. She looked to be in her late sixties, as dour-faced as he'd expected from her telephone voice. She greeted him dubiously and asked him to wait on one of the leather-upholstered chairs, but before he could sit down the inner door opened and a big-boned, blond woman in her mid-thirties came out, laughing as she flipped some papers onto the desk.

  She said to Marie Devereaux, "Look at this! Those complete and utter yo-yos! Can you believe it?"

  Marie Devereaux looked over the papers and allowed her eyebrows to rise.

  "Honest to god!" the blonde said. She turned to Mo and included him in the moment: "Can't tell you the joke, but it involves the bookkeeping practices of one of the institutions I do consulting for. Marie and I had a bet, and she just won. Damn!"

  "What'd you win?" Mo asked.

  "Tickets to a Mets game," Marie Devereaux said primly. "Detective Ford, this is Dr. In galls."

  Mo tried not to show his surprise. He had read parts of her profiles of the Howdy Doody killer, insightful but technical, and he'd learned that she was highly regarded in psychological circles, author of several influential books. He'd expected a woman like the secretary: older, serious, stuffy in a Viennese, turn-of-the-century sort of way.

  Dr. Ingalls invited him back into her office, and he followed her into a large corner room with tall windows and a collection of potted fig and lemon trees. Desk with laptop computer, a pair of couches facing each other, several comfortable-looking chairs. Ansel Adams photos of Yosemite on the walls along with some wild crayon drawings by kids, all nicely framed. An antique buffet covered with carved wooden bird sand rainbow-hued blown-glass vases. A floor-to-ceiling bookshelf covered one wall, but there was no sign of dark leather chaiselongues or the other somber furnishings Mo unconsciously expected in a shrink's office.

  Dr. Ingalls stood expectantly at her desk. "Hungry? This is lunch, right?"

  "Sure, food would be nice."

  That seemed to please her. "Can we just order out? There's a fabulous Chinese takeout just two blocks over, they'll bring it up, we can have a picnic here . . . ?" She waited for his nod, then picked up the phone, tapped a number from memory.

  He watched her as she ordered, still feeling a little stunned by her informality, her unpretentiousness, her looks. She wore a blue dress, mid calf length, and in her heels she was nearly his height. Big-boned, solidly built, yes, but a good figure. Thick golden hair, a face too wholesome to be pretty exactly, but nice blue eyes, big easy smile. Not at all what he'd expected.

  When she got off the phone, she took him back toward the two couches, sat him in one, and settled herself opposite him, a coffee table in between. "I hope you don't mind," she said. "Eating here, I mean. I'm just starved, and we only have this hour. We'll cover more ground if we don't have to go out."

  "So how do you like New York?"Mo asked. He was glad to see that surprised her a little, evened them up a bit.

  "Is that astute observation, or just an indication you've read my bio?"

  "Observation, but it doesn't require any astuteness. Your accent, your informality—Midwest,right?"

  She feigned chagrin. "Can't hide it, huh? But you're right. Southern Illinois born and bred, fed on sweet corn and fresh dairy. I did my post grad work at Columbia, so I lived here then, then returned to Chicago for some years. I moved back here a year ago, and I've loved every minute. How about yourself?"

  "New York area, all my life." He shrugged.

  "Marie says you want to talk about Ronald Parker and my profiling work for the FBI. What brings it up? I should warn you, I've got to be a little careful here, they're planning to use me as a witness at his trial. Among other testimony, I'll bring in his match to the psych profile I established."

  "There's been another murder, up in White Plains. It fits everything I know about Ronald Parker's MO. If there's a copycat out there, I figured the best starting place for his profile is what you guys put together about Parker. I'm meeting this afternoon with the special agent in charge, and my guess is we'll end up reactivating the Howdy Doody task force—you'll no doubt hear from him."

  Hearing that there'd been a copycat murder clearly troubled her. Her eyebrows became tildes, two gentle S-curves, and she took a moment before answering carefully, "Ronald Parker is by far the most disturbing case I've been involved with. For a number of reasons."

  "Such as? I don't mean to make you go over familiar ground, but this only fell into my lap a couple of days ago. I'm not up on the details." Mo took out his pocket notebook and pen.

  Again Dr. Ingalls seemed to need a moment to frame her answer. She got up, tucked her hair into a pony tail, and secured it with a bunchy blue hair band. She went to the window and leaned on the sill, then turned and sat against it, facing him again.

  "Erik Biedermann will push you out, Mr. Ford," she said."He'll structure the task force so that he pilots it and the State Police don't have any say in the direction of the investigation. He'll explain that it's a case of unusual complexity, best left to the 'real pros.' That being the case, do you really need to know the details? I'm just trying to save you time and energy here."

  Mo found himself bristling. He'd never met Biedermann, but he'd never heard anything positive said about him. An arrogant Fed, probably a glory hog, with contempt for the various regional police organizations he had to interface with. Mo felt a flash of guilt, thinking of his own reactions to the Buchanan police: country cops.

  "We'll have to see about that," he told her."I'm—" He tried to think of a way to say it that wouldn't sound like some kind of macho posturing, then thought of Dr. In galls's frankness and spontaneity and decided the hell with it, he'd reciprocate. "I don't usually give as hit what guys like Biedermann want. I'll make my own decisions about my own cases. What I need to know, what I do. We're pros, too. With better solve and conviction rates than the FBI."

  She looked at him dubiously, but then grinned. It was nice to see the smile again, Mo decided, you could get hooked on making this woman smile.

  "Let me start with Ronald Parker," she began. She crossed her arms and he rankles, a nice shape against the window light. "What I'll do is, I'll conflate what I theorized about him in advance of his capture—much of which proved to be accurate—and what we now know about his background. If we're after a copycat, we'll want to draw any parallels from facts, not guesses."

  Mo nodded, clicked his pen.

  Okay, she said. What did we know from the victimology? Both men and women, an unusual pattern for organized serial killers, who usually strike only one gender. At first, she and the Behavioral Sciences profilers had wondered whether the killer might be bisexual. But given that there was no evidence of sexual assault upon the victims, a better guess would be that the choice of victims stemmed from the specifics of the killer's childhood trauma. Serial crimes were often symbolic reenactments of or retributions for psychological injuries sustained in childhood, abuses most often committed by parents, stepparents, or other relatives. The evenhandedness of this killer suggested he had been abused by both genders, maybe both mother and father, or at leastblamed both parents.

  Too, there was a disturbing consistency in the appearance of the victims. All
were blond-haired and light complexioned, medium to tall in height. This suggested, again, that the murders were symbolic retributions or reenactments, and Dr. Ingalls suspected the killer would prove to be blond and light-skinned, either because the original abusers were his parents and he'd have inherited their looks or because he was reenacting his own trauma and the victims were surrogate "selves."

  "So then we looked at the mode of death itself," she said. "The use of handcuffs, the suspension of the victims using fishline, and the meticulous organization of the objects at the murder scene told us this was all aboutcontrol—exercising absolute control over the victims and their personal spaces was central to the psychological narrative. There are a great number of ways to exercise control, and the specific technique in this case suggested that the murderer had once been similarly controlled, maybe tied up. We even made a note that we might find scarring on the wrists or ankles of the killer, and sure enough, Ronald Parker shows evidence of prior dermal trauma at both sites. I'll show you."

  Dr. Ingalls rummaged in a file cabinet and came out with two photographs, which she handed to Mo. There was one close-up of hands and forearms, another of lower legs and feet. She sat next to him on the couch and pointed out the barely visible, irregular lines of paler skin. "These are Ronald Parker's wrists and ankles. We were right that his murders reenacted his own earlier trauma."

  Mo was impressed. He tried not to be conscious of her proximity, the smell of her hair, but failed. She got up again and returned to the window, Mo railing at himself for his adolescent vulnerability to the nearness of a beautiful woman. And then that thought hit him on the bounce—was she beautiful? Since when? Looking at her now, he decided, yes, very much so, just not in the typical ways. Jesus, he was in lousy shape, he thought. And Dr. Ingalls was sharp, she'd see it in him.

  She went on, looking troubled again: "We thought we were smart, but there were some things we never did pull together. We didn't get to question Parker before he—you know about this?— before he hanged himself, gave himself brain damage. He's not going to be able to tell us certain things."

  "Like—?"

  "The arranging. What exactly it signified to him, how it pertained to the original abuse he suffered. Also the use of the ice tongs on the head, why he wanted to injure them that particular way. Also whether he did the arranging before, during, after—"

  "He didn't do the arranging," Mo said. He remembered the insight that had come to him down in the musty bowels of the power station. "Or rather, he didn't do it directly. Everybody assumed the reason why his fingerprints were never found on the objects, or anywhere, was because he wore gloves—"

  "He had a box of latex gloves in the car when they caught him."

  "Hedid wear gloves. But he didn't do the arranging. His victims did. While he held their strings. While he' turned their heads, moved them from place to place with the ice tongs sunk into their temples."

  "Oh, Jesus," Dr. Ingalls said. She went quickly to sit down on the other couch.

  "You said yourself it was about control. Parker moved them like puppets. The whole point of the arrangements was just to exercise control—not so much on the environment, on the victims. To savor his ability to manipulate a living person absolutely. For hours and hours."

  "Oh, God." She looked as if she could visualize it too clearly. "We . . . we assumed the victim's fingerprints were on things because he always killed in their houses, and . . . and you'd expect their prints to be there. But it was also because they did the arranging. He made them. How horrible!" She blew out a breath, shook her head, troubled. But then she smiled again, wham, a solid Plains-states smile, unabashedly appreciative. "You are one smart cop! You've had this case for what, four days? I'm impressed!"

  Mo savored that for a second or two. And then Marie Devereaux put her head through the door. "Your lunch is here," she told them disapprovingly.

  8

  THEY ATE FROM PAPER plates, sitting on opposite sides of the coffee table and leaning forward over white cartons of moo shee pork, kung pao chicken, egg rolls, white rice, wonton soup. Dr. Ingalls hitched her skirt up to facilitate eating, still demure just above the knee, and spread several napkins on her lap. She ate like a stevedore, shoveling the food off her plate directly into her mouth with deft pivots of the chopsticks, smacking her lips. The food was great, Mo hadn't realized how hungry he was.

  After a while, Mo said, "You don't seem like a person who would go into forensic psychology."

  "I'm not!My main field is child psychology. My whole FBI connection is an accident—they consulted me on some letters from a child being held by kidnappers. Wanted me to get clues about her emotional state, maybe about the identity of her abductors or the location where they were holding her. I got a lot of things right, so they began calling me in on other things, not directly child-related. Given that adult psychoses usually result from childhood trauma, profiling really benefits from a developmental psychology perspective. I'm not proud of the fact, but I apparently have a talent for deducing the mental states of bad guys. So they keep coming to me."

  She wiped her mouth with a napkin and licked her lips. "But thank you. If I may say so, you don't strike me as a person who would go into homicide investigation."

  "How so?"

  "Well,you're too thoughtful, you're too self-critical,you're too uncomfortable with death and pain. I'd have pegged you as, oh, a historian, or a writer of popular books on something like archaeology or current science issues—" She looked at him penetratingly, observing that she'd scored hits.

  "What else," he said, feeling a little exposed.

  "Divorced recently." And then she looked surprised at herself."I'm sorry, that's—"

  "It's that obvious, huh? How about you?"

  She shrugged and went back to her eating, selecting a blackened, curled chili, looking at it closely before cautiously nipping the end of it. "I was . . . engaged . . . in Chicago. He couldn't relocate. It fell apart after a couple of months of living a thousand miles apart." She made a face at the chili's burn or the recollection.

  "Which would seem predictable," Mo said. "Prompting questions about why you moved to begin with."

  But she pulled away with a frown, leaning against the couch back. "I think we're getting off the topic, Detective Ford. I'd like to get back to Ronald Parker."

  So her candor had its limits, Mo thought, and she could be hard, businesslike, if she needed to be."Yes," he agreed.

  She glanced at her watch and offered as an explanation or apology, "Only because I'm conscious of the time—I have another appointment in fifteen minutes—"

  "Goa head."

  "Okay. What else did we know about him in advance? Above average height and weight, in good physical condition. That one was simple—four of his victims were men, in generally good shape, and it would take at least parity in strength to overcome them. Also, it would take considerable strength to hoist people up as he tied them to the eyelets."

  Mo nodded, remembering O'Connor's weight as he came off the wall.

  "High intelligence and good organizational skills, seen in the amount of planning, the assembly in advance of tools and materials, the observation of victims' living habits—he had to ascertain that he could have them in his control for many hours without risk of interruption. We also saw high intelligence, maybe even police experience, in his ability to avoid leaving trace evidence at the scenes. The plastic police handcuffs also suggested a law enforcement background. We were wrong there. But education, we theorized a bachelor's degree at least and Parker had a BS." Dr. Ingalls frowned at herself. "Is any of this helpful at all?"

  "Absolutely." Mo looked at his notebook and realized that for all she'd told him, he hadn't made it halfway through his list of questions. He was aware of the time ticking away. "So who isRonald Parker—what's his personal history?"

  "As we'd guessed, he was an adopted child. His parents are now dead, and we have no proof of abuse other than the ligature scars on his wrists an
d ankles. But adoptive, step-, or foster parents account for seventy percent of child abuse. He grew up in New Jersey and New York. Interestingly, he himself went 'missing' about two years before we caught him. I believe at that point his pathology overwhelmed him, and he could no longer maintain the persona of normalcy, so he went undercover when he started killing. We're not sure what pushed him over the brink, made him leave a snug job as a bank teller in Newark. We still don't know where he was or what he did during his two years out of view. But we're afraid there may be other victims we haven't located yet or don't yet recognize as his. He may have spent the two years 'warming up' for the fully developed ritual. If often takes a serial murderer several tries to identify the acts which best satisfy his compulsions."

  "Okay,"Mo said. "Have we got time for one more? I don't know if you need prep time for your next appointment, or—"

  "You're very considerate. Sure, we have time for one more." She said it graciously, but she had begun packing away the food cartons, tidying up.

  Mo stood to help her. "Okay. So what connected the victims to him? How did he select them?" This would be critical if they were going to anticipate what the copycat did next.

  To his surprise, Dr. Ingalls seemed to become distinctly uncomfortable. She grabbed the cartons and shoved them into the take-out bag, her movements brusque and businesslike."This was a difficult point for the whole task force, and no one has ever established his connections to all the victims. But we believe he chose them from chance encounters and professional contacts on two criteria. First, that they looked like his archetypal persecutor, the tallish blonde, mid-twenties to mid-forties. Second, that in the course of their contact they somehow'controlled' him. We know that he made contact with one victim through the bank where he worked and she was a customer. Apparently she accused him of shortchanging her when she cashed a check, and she raised a fuss about it that no doubt gave him a lot of stress. Another was a mechanic who had worked on his car. Parker believed the man had taken too long to replace the clutch and then overcharged him. In both cases, we see people 'controlling'Parker, and Parker exacting retribution by asserting his own control—absolute control unto the death. The others, we're still not sure how they came to his attention, but we're assuming a similar pattern. They had the bad luck to look like some manipulative monster from Parker's past and to interact with him in such away that he felt controlled by them."