by Daniel Hecht
Mike rolled his eyes. Mo smiled, joked around, tried to figure out what to say to the kids. Mike sat down on the bed, too, eyes drooping with fatigue, and took the little boy on his lap. After a little while Mo said he'd let himself out, and he left them there, the five of them. Big mammal pile. Happy for now, tired, coping. A family.
Not for everybody, but Mo could see how for a guy like St. Pierre it was really not too bad.
Next order of business: Flannery had commanded an appearance, the first jerk of the chain. So Mo drove across town to the county offices building, a massive glass and steel edifice that Mo thought made a nice palace for somebody like Flannery, full of enterprise and just as big, shiny, and bogus as he was. He took the elevator up and waited ten minutes in the outer office before a secretary showed him into the DA's inner sanctum.
Flannery was on his treadmill, dressed in gray sweats. On the console of the machine were a radio phone, a legal pad, a water bottle. His legs scissored steadily, long, firm strides, as the belt scrolled beneath him.
Flannery didn't slow down when he saw Mo. "Detective Ford! Good to see you. I know it's early in the investigation, but what with this thing up in Buchanan, and you going to see the FBI people yesterday, I figured it was time for an update."
Nice to know Flannery was keeping a close watch on everything, Mo thought. He told the DA about the power-station corpse and brought him up to speed on the precious little they'd learned from the O'Connor scene. Flannery asked a couple of good questions about Angelo's pathology findings, showing off a little and reminding Mo that he had gone to medical school before switching to law. Mo told him about the line, the knots, the other similarities.
"So," Flannery summarized,"even if the power-station corpse turns out to be left over from Ronald Parker, we've got strong parallels in the O'Connor murder. Too strong to ignore. What's your take on the possibilities?"
"A partner of Ronald Parker's that we didn't know about. Or somebody with deep access to information about his crimes."
Flannery bobbed his head thoughtfully, staring out his window at the White Plains skyline as he upped his tempo. The big arms swung vigorously, but he wasn't breathing hard, not much sweat on the tanned bald dome. The guy really was in great shape.
"How's Biedermann like that one?" Flannery asked at last. "The insider scenario? Because this case has been his baby, that'show he wanted it. The connection would almost have to be to his office, right?"
"I suggested that. He was offended. At this point, even with his trying to limit access to information, there are quite a few possible connections—the NYPD, the New Jersey people. It would take an extensive internal review to see just who knew what. I understand your people sat in sometimes, too."
Flannery frowned."Damned right we did! We knew the guy could move into our jurisdiction. And we knew the Feds would bungle it. As they obviously have done. I'm not going to let this new guy kill seven, eight people in my town, thanks."
The phone wheedled, and Flannery slapped the radio handset in front of him, cutting off the ring. For another moment he kept on striding, but their exchange seemed to have spoiled the pleasure of his workout. He punched a button, let the belt carry him to the end of the machine, stepped off. He grabbed a towel, and the first thing he dried was his head, polishing it with a few hard swipes.
When he was done, he fixed Mo with bright blue eyes that were completely without the bearish good humor people associated with Flannery. "You're an observant guy—what do you make of Biedermann?"
"He runs a tight ship. Seems to have taken catching this guy as a personal commitment." Mo thought to mention the presence of Zelek, the silent alien, but decided it wasn't worth bringing up.
Flannery nodded."Uh-huh." Mo could see the wheels turning, the politician figuring his angles. Then the DA seemed to make a decision."Okay. This is good, Detective. This is very helpful. Let's you and me make this a regular thing, you talk to my secretary and set up a catch-up session for once a week. Unless there's a big development and we'll do it often as needed. Given the need to keep information flow contained, I want your contact with this office to be through me, personally. Not," he added quickly, "that I don't trust my staff. Just so we play along with the SAC's plan. Just so nobody starts thinking of my people the wrong way, if this turns into something like that. Which we do hope it won't, don't we?"
The phone was ringing again, and Flannery tossed his towel back onto the treadmill rail.
Mo had been thinking to ask about the DA's plans for the Big Willie investigation, how long his indentured servitude to Flannery might last. But this wasn't the moment.
Flannery picked up the nagging phone. Instantly his face lit up, a big just you and me grin. "May-or Rus-sol! Just the person I wanted to talk to." He smiled as he said it, but when he looked up to toss Mo a wave of good-bye and dismissal, his face went totally serious again.
A disquieting transformation, Mo thought, not so much the sober look as the ease he moved between moods. He was glad to get out of there and back to work.
16
PROBABLY HE WOULDN'T HAVE called Gus Grisbach if he hadn't been in such a bad mood. It wasn't that he was refusing Rebecca's advice—don't get involved any more than you have to—so much as trying to find out just what he was supposed to avoid getting involved in.
When Mo had first moved up to investigator, he'd been lucky to be paired for a time with Larry Mackenzie, a good mentor who had initiated Mo not only to investigative technique but to some of the nonstandard procedures that were standard. Before he'd died of prostate cancer, Mac had bequeathed to Mo a monster of a nonstandard resource, Gus Grisbach's phone number. Gus had been an NYPD investigator for many years before taking a bullet in his brain and opting for early retirement. Gus's logical faculties were as sharp as ever, but the bullet had burrowed a messy hole through his socializing instincts, which had never been great to begin with. But retirement hadn't stopped his fanatical fight against crime. If anything, the injury had inflamed Gus's hatred of criminals to a white heat. Given that he was confined to a wheelchair and couldn't beat the streets anymore, he'd set himself up in his apartment with, supposedly, a couple hundred thousand dollars' worth of computer equipment. Gus got information for cops. Since what he did wasn't legal, no one formally acknowledged his existence. His number and a word of introduction were guardedly handed down from generation to generation of investigators like priceless heirlooms.
Mocalled from a pay phone, got a curt answering-machine message, and left his home phone number for a call back. He was thinking it would be nice to know more about Biedermann, about his career history, his move from San Diego, the murders there. Maybe a clue to Zelek and the"other dimensions" Rebecca had mentioned.
Back at Major Crimes, he worked the phones and fax machines, combed the databases. St. Pierre had done great work on Tuesday and Wednesday, and at one o'clock Mo fielded a call that had promise. An unidentified corpse could take weeks or months to put a name to, or it might never be ID'd, but here was a jeweler who thought the ring looked familiar. Mo sent him back to his billing records, and after another half hour he called back with the name of the person who had commissioned him to clean and reset the stone, one Irene Drysdale. The name wasn't on the list of possibles they'd put together from missing persons lists, but there was an Irene Bushnell, a resident of Ossining who had disappeared about six weeks ago. Mo spent another hour calling back dentists and asking them to look in their client lists for either name. By two o'clock, he had a positive match on the teeth. For once everything had fallen together like clockwork.
"Her name was Irene Bushnell,"Mo explained to Marsden a little later. "Born Drysdale, married last year. Her mother reported her missing April third, we're presuming that's the date of death." He had gone to Marsden's office with the news, and now he sat in front of his desk, both of them pissed off at what it meant.
"Mother? What about the husband?" Marsden didn't look good, the gray-green skin of his cheeks contrasti
ng sharply with the rash next to his nose.
"A truck driver, long-distance hauler. He was verifiably in Nebraska at the time."
Marsden didn't say anything for a moment, just flipped through the faxed X-rays of teeth, frowning."Yeah. And Ronald Parker was in jail and brain-damaged at the time."
Meaning that there was a serial killer on the loose in southern Westchester County, and a particularly screwball fuck at that, someone driven to imitate Howdy Doody's elaborate kills. And somehow possessing the knowledge needed to imitate them to perfection.
"Well," Mo said, "at least this explains some details of the O'Connor murder."
"Like what?" Marsden snapped.
"The air-conditioning. Whoever killed Irene Bushnell was disappointed that she wasn't discovered for six weeks. He wanted to make sure if O'Connor sat for a while he'd be in good shape. Also the positioning, right in front of the big windows. Suggests it was important to the killer to have the murder noticed, and he wasn't going to take any chances."
Marsden glared at him, slit eyes."One visit to that profiler, and you're talking psychobabble already. Okay, so what did you establish with Biedermann yesterday? Did he specify which part of his anatomy we're supposed to suck?"
Mo wasn't sure how much he should tell Marsden. "The parallels between Ronald Parker and this new guy are very close," he said. "Given how close, we'll need to reestablish the Howdy Doody task force, only now we'rein on it, and so is White Plains. Biedermann will take complete control, and we're supposed to bring him coffee and stuff."
Marsden bobbed his head as if he'd expected it. "So what's next?"
"St. Pierre's off today, but tomorrow we'll go talk to the mother and the husband. We'll want Irene Bushnell's work history, her social habits, see who she might have gotten mad at her. It's about control, so we'll keep an eye out for who might have felt controlled by her."
"Okay. You guys be sure to look for sources for fingerprints for her—civil service work, other employers, maybe arrests."
On one level, you'd think, Why bother, we know who she is, and wecan't match 'em to the corpse anyway.But Marsden had already taken a step ahead. Mo looked at him for a moment with admiration. "You're pretty good," Mo said.
Marsden thought so, too. A little self-satisfied grin. "The power-station scene is an oddball. If this guy's trying to be an exact copy, he's already blown it, he didn't kill her in her own home. Which means we might learn something new from the scene. Starting with, whose prints are on the arranged objects?"
Mo nodded: Marsden, too, had suspected that the puppeteer made the victims do the arrangements. Irene Bushnell had spent her last hours in that cave like hellhole, obeying every command of a controlling monster.
"You want to talk about Biedermann?" Marsden asked. The way he said the name suggested he didn't have a lot nice to say, especially after learning that the SAC had looked into his personnel files.
"You said you knew him. What's going on? I heard that he was transferred to the New York field office just to handle the Howdy Doody case."
Marsden shrugged. "I don't 'know' him. Talked to him on the phone, heard things. I know he was a war hero in Vietnam, he's thought of as having a political future—directorships, Justice Department, stuff like that. Takes his job very seriously."
Mo grinned at the understatement."Some of this is over my head. I mean, what happens if thereis an inside element here? Somebody with access to information about Howdy Doody, doing the new murders? Who's responsible for internal review when there are so many agencies and jurisdictions involved?"
"What happens is nobody knows how to handle it and there's a lot of distrust and internal bloodshed. A circle fuck ensues. If Biedermann was transferred here specifically to handle the Howdy Doody case, I'd guess it's because the insider possibility was something they were already considering. That's why they chose somebody with an Internal Affairs background. It would also explain why he doesn't tell anybody anything."
Mo thought about that. If that was true, it suggested that Rebecca was right, there had been prior murders back in California, with MO's similar enough to the Howdy Doody MO to trigger the insider concern. In which case—
"So there's two ways you can play this, Ford,"Marsden said. He had been watching Mo shrewdly and obviously didn't like what he saw. "One, you can pull your usual bullshit, try to go around Biedermann, run with your hunches, play Mo Ford messiah cop cowboy, and get us all in trouble. Two, you can play this extra right, SOP all the way, every piece of paper in place so that we can account for our every move and it was all by the book and nobody in our department takes the heat when something fucks up. Do I have to spell out which option I'd prefer?"
When Marsden spoke like that, the exaggerated precision, the chill coming into his gravelly voice, it was time to make serious agreeing noises and get out of his office. "No. I hear you," Mo said.
"I'll tell you something else," Marsden went on. "Look at me. I'm feeling like shit. We're moving my goddamned angiogram up, my cardiologist has already scheduled bypass surgery for right after because he's pretty sure what the angio is going to show. My point is, I don't need any more stress."
Mo felt a pang of dismay at that. Marsden was more than smart, he was tough and fair and straight up, and he took care of his own people. If he left, the complexion of this job would change, and it could only change for the worse.
"I hear you," Mo said again. "By the book. Don't worry," he added, meaning about me fucking up and about the surgery. Marsden squinted at him skeptically and shifted his gaze to some papers. Mo left the office sincerely hoping he wouldn't have to renege on his promise.
17
MO HAD DINNER AT A restaurant, burger and fries and house salad, and got back to the house well after dark. He pulled up in front and sat looking at the tree-shadowed facade for a moment, summoning the energy to go inside. What the hell was he doing here? It was the kind of older burb he'd envied as a kid but now mostly resented for its complacent affluence and aloofness. The street was dark with heavy foliage that cut the streetlight glow into puzzle patterns, the houses were separated by wide lawns and thick hedges. The windows in all the others were warm and yellow-, while Carla's mom's house had the black, curtain less windows of abandonment. The air was humid and too hot for May, the oven breath of global warming coming over the Northeast and making it feel like the Deep South. That Gothic, muggy, overgrown feel. Kudzu was already well established here, he thought, how long before the Spanish moss came along?
Bitch, bitch, he chided himself. He took his briefcase off the seat and left the car.
Inside, he went through the empty living room and into the back of the house, where he put on some lights that revealed the holes where Carla's stuff had been. The gap once occupied by her nice antique rocking chair. The place where the stereo cabinet had stood, where a fifty-buck boom box now lay on the floor amid dust bunnies and pen tops and lost coins revealed when they'd taken the sound system to her car. The bookshelf was still there, but now his own books lay jumbled on half-empty shelves, and the pretty things were gone from its top, leaving only faint impressions in the dust. All that remained were a couple of his shooting trophies, chrome and blue plastic, which without Carla's curios had lost the look of ironic kitsch and now appeared just garish and distinctly declasse. Especially in the unflattering light of the ceiling lights—she had taken all the floor lamps.
He hit the fridge for some beer but there wasn't any left. Instead he found a carton of lemonade and sat for a moment, swigging it from the box. Tonight he'd intended to spend some time looking over the rental classifieds, but he'd forgotten to bring home a newspaper, and now he was too tired to go out to buy one.
For a while he thought about Dr. Rebecca Ingalls, the way she looked and talked as they strolled toward Battery Park. But immediately he railed at himself. She's way beyond your reach, get real, take a lookaround—what're you going to do, invite her over?
The other pisser was that while he was mad
at Carla for taking it so lightly, for moving out so easily, and while he agreed it was probably necessary, he still missed her. A night like tonight, back when, he'd court her. He'd put his hands on her waist, holding her hip bones, and kiss her forehead, her nose, her lips. She'd smell like a night-blossoming flower, stoning him instantly. Still standing, he'd bring one leg just a little between her legs, and he'd feel her begin to respond, and after a while they'd be making love and all this deep Dixie heat would become intriguingly sensual, a complement to the primal sweat and scent of lovemaking—
He caught himself slipping and pulled away from the thoughts, emptying his head again with an effort.
In the bedroom, he took off his shoes and then his gun and holster, which he hung on the chair next to the bed. Then he unbuttoned his shirt and threw it onto the floor with the other dirty laundry. Probably he should put on some music, chase the emptiness away, but he just needed a minute to charge up his energy. He felt the dark, empty house around him, cottony silent back here except for the faintdrone of the refrigerator through the kitchen wall.
It was the shits.
A hard week. He wasn't really constitutionally well configured for homicide work. What had Rebecca said? Too uncomfortable with death and pain. That was part of it. Tonight he knew the week's images would come back, the bad pictures, the bad thoughts. O'Connor strung up in his agonies. Big Willie's broad, convulsing back and later his cold flesh and dead weight as the body tipped onto the gurney. Irene Bushnell's head and spinal cord hanging upside down against the bricks as the rat came down the wall—
He startled when he heard a noise from the front of the house. A thump and a series of clicks and then nothing. His ears strained against the silence. Then he slid the Glock out of its holster. Barefoot, he crept out of the bedroom, through the kitchen, and into the dining-cum-living-room. Beyond was the dark, streetlight-mottled front room, and the hall where the stairs came down. Another clunk, a shifting sound, and his pulse began to shake him.
