Puppets

by Daniel Hecht

  Mo paused, undecided on how to proceed. Bushnell was going to be a tough one.

  After a moment Mo put down his notebook, went over to the beer cans on the floor, picked them up one by one, put them on the dining table. The last one he held up as he looked back at Bushnell. "You got any more of these?"

  The gesture took Bushnell by surprise. "Icebox," he said.

  Mo went into a kitchen that made his own look like something out ofGood Housekeeping and opened the refrigerator. It contained mostly beer of different brands. He broke a couple of cans out of their yoke, went back into the living room, and handed one to Bushnell. Mo popped the top on his, not really wanting to drink this early. But what the hell, he decided. He loosened his tie and took a seat at the dining table as he sipped.

  It took a while, but he managed to wring some details out of Bushnell. Apparently Irene had worked five days a week at different houses for a cottage industry run by another local woman, a company called The Gleam Team. On the lifestyle side, she had church and her mother and some girlfriends down the road. Byron and Irene liked to catch stock car races when they could, and on weekends the two of them hung out at a couple of local bars. They played pool with an informal circle of regulars, Irene was pretty good. They had both grown up in the area, so ten years after graduation they still knew a lot of people from high school. Mo got the impression of a lifestyle stuck overlong in the fast-and-loose stage, a passionate but often rocky marriage, occasional run-ins with the local police for fighting or driving while intoxicated. No, Bushnell couldn't think of any altercations between Irene and anyone, nothing where anyone would have thought of her as controlling.

  After an hour, Bushnell was running out of useful detail even as his nostalgia was gaining momentum, and Mo decided it was time to throw him a curve, see how he reacted."She sounds like a really great person," he said sympathetically. "You're hurting pretty badly, huh?"

  Bushnell's face registered anger for an instant, the resistance of a man to emotional probing. And then the face crumpled and tears gushed from his eyes. "Six weeks she was gone, but I was still hoping, I kept hoping maybe . . . " His body folded forward as he wrapped around his pain and cried wrenchingly, the convulsive heaving of someone giving up to loss.

  Scratch Bushnell as any kind of suspect, Mo thought. He folded away his notebook, stood up, clapped Bushnell's quaking shoulder as he went out.

  The power-station scene had changed completely. Mo bumped down the access road to find the parking area filled with cars, trucks, vans. Lots of federal license plates. He spotted St. Pierre's car among the others.

  The whole building was ringed with yellow tape, and sections of the ground outside had been cordoned off. One of the FBI vehicles was a big Evidence Response Team technical van with satellite dishes on its roof, its back doors open and people working on equipment on the platform. Another was a truck-mounted generator running at a high idle and trailing heavy cables into the building. The sheer amount of resources in play meant that Biedermann was taking this very seriously.

  Mo followed a pair of FBI techs around to the main door and was surprised to come face-to-face with Dr. Rebecca Ingalls. Her eyebrows jumped as she recognized him, and then she smiled.

  He was conscious of not looking his best, but he returned the smile. "What are you doing here?" he asked.

  She shrugged self-deprecatingly."I'm doing—what do they call the TV sportscasters, the ex-pros who don't call the plays but sit there and—"

  "'Color.' You're doing color?"

  "Yeah."She frowned. "I'm trying to do psychological background, the implications of choosing this place to kill her. What it means that it's not her home, what that tells us about this killer. I was downstairs, but I, um, I needed a break." She tilted her head back, shut her eyes, gave her face to the muted sun for a moment.

  "I know what you mean. Any conclusions?"

  She brought her chin back down. "No. Other than it's a terrible place to be tortured to death." Obviously, she wasn't enjoying this visit to the Westchester countryside.

  Mo nodded. The sheet metal over the main doors had been removed and the front of the big brick building gaped into the open air. Faint voices echoed inside, and a fetid, humid smell wafted up out the dark opening.

  "Erik's inside," she said.

  "Too bad." Mo scuffed at the fractured concrete of the walk.

  That gave her a little amusement.

  He hesitated, then started inside. But she called to him, "I was talking to your colleague—Mike, right?He's such a sweet young man. He thinks you're the greatest, you know." That was flattering, Mo thought, surprised. Rebecca went on, "He has complete faith you'll solve this, that nobody could stop you, you're another Sherlock Holmes. Also that Erik is the Antichrist."

  Better and better, Mo thought. "St. Pierre's a good guy," he acknowledged,"but he only moved up to Major Crimes a couple of months ago."

  She caught his eyes quickly before turning back to the sun."I'll be down again in a few minutes," she said.

  The lower level of the power station was bathed in lights. Biedermann's people had set pole lights at all four corners of the big room, three brilliant panels on each, and two more light installations shone down from the stair railing. In the light, the place looked worse, filthy and moldy, full of dead vegetation, used condoms, other trash. There were probably twenty ERT people in the rubble now, crouching or standing with heads down, scanning the ground. Mike St. Pierre sat on the bottom step, looking a little overwhelmed.

  "Hey," Mo said, coming down behind him.

  "Hey."

  "Where's Biedermann?"

  "Back in the murder room. He's just now letting people get to work, they had photographers in here for a couple of hours, don't trust ours to do a good job."

  "Is he telling you anything?"

  St. Pierre shrugged, scuffed at the layer of dust and soil on the broken concrete floor. "The dirt's a good thing, something not at any of the residences. Footprints, signs of struggle might tell us more about how it went down. They did these overhead photos, scene mapping. Biedermann acts like he'd like to take the place down and reassemble it somewhere, like an airplane crash. But I was gonna tell you—"

  But he stopped as Rebecca came down the stairs to stand beside them with a determined expression. The three of them looked over the scene for a moment, not speaking. Seeing this much focused human industry in one place was impressive.

  "So what do you think happened here?" Mo asked her at last.

  "Something went wrong," she said immediately. "This wasn't part of the plan."

  " 'Plan'?" St. Pierre asked.

  "Not 'plan' exactly. But this was a mistake, a slip of control."

  "And it's about control,"Mo mused.

  She nodded. "Erik had his crew do some video with overhead boom cameras. He's looked at sections of it, thinks there are indications of a struggle, maybe even of sexual assault. From marks in the dirt and other trash—you can't really see it from ground level."

  That was smart, Mo admitted grudgingly. Biedermann was exploiting the particulars of this anomalous scene to maximum advantage. And if Irene Bushnell had been raped before she was killed, it did signal a radical departure from the Howdy Doody MO. Still, all the evidence in the world, short of finding fingerprints they could match with prints on record somewhere, wouldn't help them locate the killer. Mo's instincts told him the answer lay with tracing Irene Bushnell's contacts with other people. Somewhere, her world had intersected the killer's world, she had caught his attention. Somehow, he had gotten her to this place. He thought of Byron Bushnell, the possibilities that their social life suggested, The Gleam Team, her church. And he'd bet good money he and St. Pierre and the local contacts of the NYSP could do a better job than the federals at following up on those things.

  "So what's he looking for here?" Mo asked."What's he expect to find?"

  Rebecca answered immediately,"Sometimes it's almost as if he already knows who it is and hopes to find
verification of that from trace evidence." Then she looked surprised at herself, as if she hadn't intended to say so much. She frowned, then pointed with her chin back toward the death-room door. "But why don't you ask Erik?"

  Biedermann was coming out of the room with a cell phone to his ear. He looked serious and a little haggard, rubbing his hand across his brush cut with exasperated strokes. When he glanced up and saw Mo, he scowled. Mo gave him a laconic salute.

  When Biedermann came up to him, he slapped the phone shut. "Detective Ford," he said.

  "Very impressive," Mo said, gesturing at the booms and lights and the army of investigative talent. "Coming up with anything interesting?" "We'll talk about it at the next task force meeting. Right now I've got to get back to Manhattan."

  "Dr. Ingalls says you'reconsidering the possibility of sexual assault."

  Biedermann moved past him on the stairs, scowling at Rebecca. "The possibility, yes. I will definitely keep you informed." He trotted on up the stairs with the stolid agility of a big, fit man, never looking back. At the top he gave curt orders to one of his people, pointing around the room. Then he was gone, out the front door.

  Mo watched his broad back disappear from view, disliking him again. The lack of courtesy, that proprietary frown at Rebecca.

  "Good of him to keep us informed," St. Pierre suggested. "Hey, Mo, I was going to tell you—"

  Mo said, "Rebecca, one more question about Erik, and then I promise I'll shut up about him. You know in his office he's got that knife on a plaque, right, a gift from the people he supervised at Internal Affairs?"

  "The backstabber joke. Erik says every IA supervisor gets one when he moves on."

  "Right. And he's also got that dog collar, the fancy redone with the studs and stuff on it? He was going to tell me about that, but we didn't get to it. What's with that?"

  She grinned."Another joke, a gift from his team when he left San Diego. Same general idea. It's got an inscription on the dog tag that says something like, 'You can have this back, we've worn it long enough.' Suggesting Erik is a tough boss."

  Mo chewed his lips, nodding, still gazing up the stairs. "Right. I'll bet he is."

  She looked at him, and after a second her eyes widened. "Wait a minute. Where are you going with this?"

  He gave it a second's thought."Nowhere. Don't worry." And that was the truth, he'd been letting himself think out loud, bad idea, and it really was presumptuous of him anyway, way too premature.

  19

  DRIVING THE ROADS OF Westchester again, heading back toward White Plains. This time the parade of SUVs was diluted with leftovers from the previous automotive phenom, deluxe minivans.

  What St. Pierre had been trying to tell him was some information he'd gotten from Irene Bushnell's mother. In his usual self-effacing way, he said, "I don't know if this is worth anything or not, I mean maybe I'm reading more into it than—" Mo had tried to instruct him in the art of appearing confident, with the goal of inspiring a similar emotion in others, but he wasn't there yet. But what St. Pierre had correctly identified as important from his interview with the mother was that, one, she thought Irene might have been having an affair recently. It was an opening, a window into circumstances of Irene's life that her husband wouldn't know or wouldn't want to admit to anyone.

  The second detail was that Mrs. Drysdale said her daughter had been very interested in the Howdy Doody killings, had followed news of the investigation in the papers, talked about it now and again. It was the kind of detail that cried out for attention, either an irony or a coincidence or—Mo hoped—a clue to her connection with whoever killed her.

  It was two o'clock and Mo wanted to go interview Mrs. Drysdale immediately. Rebecca volunteered to come along with him to Tarrytown, provided Mo gave her a ride back to New York after ward. From a strictly professional standpoint, he told himself, it made sense to have a female, especially someone well-trained in psychology, present at a second interview with an older, grieving woman.

  So now they drove along, not saying anything. Rebecca's face was serious, verging on angry.

  "I'm just keeping my mind open," he said at last."I'm, what do they call it, 'thinking out of the box.'"

  "You're thinking that Erik is the person inside. The person who knows the Howdy Doody MO well enough to imitate it so closely. And that really disappoints me, because I thought you were a more self-inspected person. He'snot a serial killer, and you are obviously letting"— she stumbled over the next part—"letting other emotions bias your judgment. At the very least, I thought you were a better investigator."

  He drove along, feeling cheerful."My other emotions like what?"

  "I'm not going to be baited into juvenile banter. I didn't come along to play footsie with you. I thought I should take the opportunity to head off a really,really unprofitable and destructive line of thought on your part."

  His cheerfulness faded fast. "Why are you so certain nobody should look at Erik? Because you know him so well? Because you couldn't possibly sleep with a killer?"

  Her eyes blazed and she craned around to look behind them as if she were debating stepping out of the moving car. "This was a mistake. Take me back to the power station. You are overstepping professional bounds, Detective Ford."

  "I'm not saying anything about your professional judgment that you didn't just say about mine."

  She started to snap back but then accepted it. "I'm not sleeping with a killer," she said under her breath.

  Which could be interpreted two ways, Mo thought. Not sleeping with. Or just not with a killer.

  "He's been involved from the beginning," Mo said. "He's very, very jealous of who gets information about the killings. He's showing very intense interest in the case, giving it more personal attention than I've ever seen any SAC do, ever."

  "He was assigned the case, he's keeping information tight because there's the insider possibility, and he's a very good agent in charge who givesevery case his close personal attention."

  "And he's a very controlling personality—"

  "How many of those are there in the State Police, the FBI, the various district attorney's offices, do you think?"

  Mo tossed his head and admitted,"Just about all of em." Yes, he had been premature invoicing suspicions of Biedermann, probably it was the guy's attitude on the stairs that had made him say it out loud. She was right to tell him so. And maybe she was right, maybe bringing her along now had not been such a good idea, given the degree of his own fucked-upedness.

  In Tarrytown, he turned off Route 9 and headed east. St. Pierre had told him that Mrs. Drysdale worked a two-to-ten evening shift at Quality Plastics, a big warehouse and plant on the outskirts of the city, and he was trying to remember just where it was. With any luck, they'd get a few details from Mrs. Drysdale, he'd drop Rebecca at her place by five o'clock with curt good-byes, he'd get back to Carla'smother's lovely house by seven.

  "Can I make a personal observation?" she asked. She had been leaning against the passenger door, arms folded, watching him drive.

  "Yeah. Sure. I guess." He hoped it wasn't too unflattering.

  "I'm not very good at beating around the bush, playing word games. You'd think I would be, because I use words to finesse people into constructive perspectives on themselves all day . . . But I hate fencing with people about important things. It goes against my philosophical commitments, it doesn't come naturally for me, and it never leads anywhere good. I don't know you very well, but I think you're the same way. The no-bullshit type."

  "True. Thanks."

  "I'm saying this because, if you don't get yourself taken off this case by being stupid and impulsive, you and I will probably be working together. So I want to tell you that I am not currently involved in a personal relationship with Erik Biedermann. I don't say it as some kind of an invitation, I say it as something I don't want to have to dance around every time you and I consult. Not one more time."

  "Okay. I'm sorry, honestly—"

  She held up
her hands, stopping him."I don't do invitations that way. Here's how I do them: Mo, so far I think you're pretty great. I think I know where you're at right now, emotionally. Let's get together off duty, maybe for dinner. And then let's be sure our personal interests, if it ends up we have any, stay out of our professional collaboration."

  And instantly he felt terrific again. He pulled up at a stoplight and looked over at her. She was watching him, dead-eye serious, straight on. Turned toward him, one thigh curved beautifully on the seat, she looked stunning and formidable. The traffic moved and he accelerated again before he could answer her.

  "You are something else," he told her finally. "You know that?"

  The Quality Plastics plant consisted of a pair of gigantic rectangular steel buildings with a low brick office wing stuck on the front of one, next to the company sign and three dead saplings in circles of redwood bark. Industrial"park," Mo thought, disgusted. AnotherOrwellian Newspeak oxymoron. At the front office, he showed his ID and the guy in charge said yes, he already knew about Irene Bushnell's death. He led them back to an office substation in the warehouse section of the plant, paged Mrs. Drysdale, left them there.

  The warehouse interior was cavernous. Quality Plastics made all kinds of things, stored here under bright fluorescents in stacks and on girdered shelves that reached to the ceiling, forty feet above. Just down the aisle, a worker was using a forklift with a spindle attachment to load a roll of bubble wrap the size of a minivan onto a high shelf. Farther down, another lift was moving around huge slabs of pale green foam. The air was sharp with the smell of plastic and the propane exhaust from the forklifts.

  Mrs. Drysdale emerged from the distance, a little figure lost in a canyon of plastic products. When she got closer, Mo could see that she was a short, dumpy, sad-faced woman wearing jeans and a red sweatshirt emblazoned with the Quality Plastics logo. She was probably only around fifty, but her hair was gray and hung limply halfway to her slumped shoulders. When she walked up to the substation railing, she told them if they wanted to talk to her, they had to come back to where she was working. "I was gonna call in sick today," she said, "but then I didn't want to be alone at the apartment. I gotta kept my mindoff it."