Puppets

by Daniel Hecht

  "That'd be good," he told her.

  They both clammed up as they came into the range. Not too many shooters today, just two booths in use, the room thumping erratically with their shots. They took stations eleven and twelve, setting out their boxes of ammunition, checking their weapons, loading. She stepped back from her booth and seemed to be having difficulty with her magazine, but he didn't offer to help, figuring it might seem condescending. Instead he put up the Glock and emptied the gun at the man-shaped target, eighteen quick shots. He hit the target return button, and when he looked away, he found her staring at him, round-eyed. He pulled down his headphones and so did she.

  "What in the world were you doing?" she asked.

  "What do you mean?"

  "Shooting so fast. Aren't you supposed to aim?"

  But the target gusted up to his station and they both turned to look at it. It was a pretty good cluster, Mo thought, one messy hole obliterating the little X at dead center where maybe eight shots had gone through, and then a scattering within two inches. But two holes were out almost the width of his hand, clear evidence he was not in top shape.

  "Jesus," she said, looking over the target. "I didn't know people could actually do . . . that. So this is something you do a lot?"

  Mo shrugged, not knowing whether she'd consider shooting skill a character asset. "Not really. Just a natural thing. Good distance vision or something."

  "Uh-huh," she said skeptically. She looked at the unloaded bullets in her hand, dismayed. "Now I'm embarrassed to shoot."

  But she got over it. She finished loading, got ready to fire. He stood back to watch her, realizing it wasn't her shooting stance that he was looking at but the in-curve at her waist, the length of her fine legs as she braced herself and took her two-handed grip. He could tell she was a lousy shot from the way her gun moved around. Here's where you're supposed to come up behind her and help her stabilize her arms and talk into her ear about her form and grip and all that cliche stuff, he thought, and the idea of being that close to her made his belly warm, his limbs loose. He felt dazzled, irradiated by her, so after emptying another magazine he moved down a booth just to get away from her. She stepped back to look at him quizzically, and he made a gesture at the target track, implying something wrong with the equipment. She nodded and went back to popping away.

  Mo shot with the Glock for a while longer, raising the challenge by taking out the numbers on the target rings. Then he shot with the little Ruger, which was not at all as accurate, barrel too short, not really designed for this distance. But still he could feel the rust falling away as his body merged with the weapons and intuited the geometries and velocities and recoil factors. He had been truthful with her, it really was an instinctive thing. But, no, he was not a bad shot.

  They had a late lunch together, leaving her car at the range and driving in Mo's to a roadside dairy freeze on the north end of town, with picnic tables along the back end of the parking lot. At the counter they ordered deep-fried everything, burgers and corn dogs and fries and rings, and took the food to a tree-shaded table on the bank of a narrow river. They were on a busy commercial strip, fifty feet away half a dozen kids were bouncing around on the restaurant's

  faded-plastic playground equipment, it was nothing like the no-man's-land of last night, but still the river scene brought Mo back there.

  Rebecca must have seen something in his face. "We could go somewhere else. I just always liked these places when I was a kid—"

  "No. This is fine. I was thinking of something, yesterday—"

  "Crime scene?"

  "This is so nice, I don't think this is the time to—"

  "I'm a psychologist. Spill it, Mo." She nipped an onion ring, holding his eyes.

  "You'll hear about it tomorrow. It's the Howdy Doody copycat,"

  he admitted gloomily. "Or whatever he is."

  She pried it out of him. Grudgingly he told her about Carolyn Rappaport, the obvious deterioration of the copycat's MO, the probability of rape. Neither of them touched the food. Rebecca was a good listener, drawing out his emotional responses to the scene as well as the forensic details. When he was done, he felt cleansed of the shocked confusion that had gripped him since last night. But he'd

  acquired the heat of it again, the anger and fear that were growing in him.

  "Look," he said, "I need to talk to you about something. Can we talk confidentially?"

  "Of course!"

  He glanced quickly around at the other customers: a family of four, two tables away, jabbering and munching, oblivious, and some other people over near the playground, too far away to overhear. "I need you to hear this right, not assume I've got weird motives. It's about Erik Biedermann."

  For once she didn't object. "Okay."

  "I have some information about his past, about his appointment to the New York field office, that bothers me." Mo felt a moment's trepidation, wondering if it was wise to trust her so much so soon, but he plunged on anyway. He told her about Biedermann's role in the black-ops hit squad, his interest in the psychology of violence, his "swept" intelligence background. Rebecca's eyes widened as he talked, and it made him feel better: She didn't know this. She didn't knowingly sleep with an assassin. Biedermann the hit-man.

  "He's got a very strange history with the FBI," he concluded. "He gets yanked out of IA and put in charge of murder investigations. Only problem is, at least with Howdy Doody, the murders start after he arrives on the scene."

  "What are you saying]"

  Mo dropped his voice further. "Biedermann moved to New York in October of '98. The first Howdy Doody murder was committed in January of '99. And that guy Zelek? He's not FBI. He doesn't exist."

  That got to her, and she had to think about it. Finally she said, "Can I ask how you know all this?"

  "No."

  She took another minute, watching the kids in the playground enclosure. By degrees her sunny face became shadowed by something she saw there. At last she lifted her chin toward the kids. "See how sweet they are? Little wild creatures, innocent, just wanting to play. I prefer to work with children, because I fall for them and they inspire me to do my best work. Also because the basic elements of human psychology are right there, not yet overlaid with the complexity we adults acquire. Little sweet people, unspoiled human nature, right? But watch them for a moment, Mo."

  He wondered where she was going with this, but he did as she instructed. There were six kids of different sizes, four girls and two boys, clambering on a boxy jungle gym, scooting down a tube slide, swinging from rings. The youngest was a boy of two or three with a tilting walk, the biggest was a chunky girl of maybe seven. The kids would back up at the ladder to the slide, jostling for position, impatient with each other. The little one struggled on the ladder rungs, nervous about the height, going slow. As Mo watched, the big girl looked quickly over at the chatting parents, then yanked the little kid off the ladder and onto his ass on the ground. She stepped on his hand as she went over him and up the ladder. He screamed and began crying and then threw gravel at her.

  "Mom!" she yelled.

  "Jimmy!" one of the women called. "No throwing! Jimmy, come here please. Right now. Jimmy, I mean it!"

  "Predictable," Rebecca said, turning back to Mo. "Because the fact is we're not nice creatures. Even when we're kids. At our most innocent, we have all kinds of nasty feelings—anger, hate, competitiveness, jealousy, sadistic impulses, vengefulness, you name it. We are full of guile. We hurt others. Look at how a girl that young is already manipulating the situation. And Jimmy—if Jimmy were an adult experiencing an intensity of emotion comparable to what he's

  feeling now, he'd probably try to kill her."

  Yes, Jimmy was really going to pieces now, a full-tilt tantrum, clawing at the chunky girl as his mother tried to drag him away.

  "My point," Rebecca finished sadly, "is that psychology has its scary dimensions."

  "You said that before. I still don't know what you mean."

&
nbsp; She toyed with a loose strand of hair as if debating something inside. "Can we drive? Just drive around for a while, then you can take me back to my car?" For the first time since he'd met her, Mo saw a deep uncertainty in her face, something like fear.

  "What I mean," she said, "is that the study of psychology has gone two ways. I shouldn't be surprised— I mean, what human endeavor hasn't? We invent things that serve to help and heal, and we use those same things to hurt and kill. Metallurgy gives us both guns and surgical tools, chemistry's used for both poisons and medicines. Nuclear science has given us invaluable medical imaging devices and the atomic bomb." She was leaning against the passenger-side door, both to face Mo and, it struck him, to keep some distance between them.

  Without thinking about it, he took them onto the Hutchinson Paver Parkway, north. "So you're saying the science of psychology can be used as a weapon, too."

  She nodded. "Some of it is common knowledge, of course. There's

  the cliche of'brainwashing,' where prisoners of war are isolated and exhausted and their egos systematically broken down, and they're

  made to tell secrets by various means. Recently you hear a lot about the science of'creating untenable psychological discomfort'—remember when Noriega was in his compound in Panama, and the U.S. forces broadcast loud rock and roll at him twenty-four hours a day? Or at the Branch Davidian compound, the ATF continuously broadcast the screams of rabbits being slaughtered? To wear them down, confuse and demoralize them. And it works."

  "Screaming rabbits?" The thought gave Mo the creeps.

  "From my doctoral work, I know a little more on the subject than most people. But especially since I've been working on forensic profiling, I've done some . . . odd . . . research and have been called in on some unusual cases. So I've glimpsed . . . the tip of some iceberg. I've encountered at least two of what I'd call manufactured personalities. Where the healing science I study has been used to make lethal weapons."

  "What the fuck is a 'manufactured personality'?"

  She wasn't looking at him anymore, and she wasn't seeing the countryside they drove through, either. "I was called in by state prosecutors on the case of a serial killer out in Oregon. They had caught the murderer, and they wanted my input on his early years to help the prosecution psychologists. There were three of us, two psychologists and a neurologist, and we were all, well, we all became certain this man had been . . . deliberately tampered with."

  "Oh, man—"

  "I'm sorry. But on every psych test and personality inventory, he showed emotional and cognitive responses like a lab-conditioned animal. What was worse, his brain scans showed two symmetrical lesions in his temporal lobes. He'd had brain surgery, Mo, but he had no recollection of it and there were no records of it! We knew he'd

  been in the army in Vietnam, so we asked for his service records, but we kept not getting them. When we told the prosecutor we couldn't

  do without his service medical records, poof, we got canned. We were taken off the case. I guess they found somebody else, some whore psychologist who'd ignore the obvious. By then, the three of us, the psych team, had dug up bits and pieces, enough to suspect this man had been part of an experimental weapons program. A program that manufactured assassins—remote-control killers. We were sure he had been made into a specialized killing machine. A programmable sociopath. He'd had brain surgery to help suspend normal inhibitions against killing, and he had been conditioned or trained to accept 'programming' from his controllers. They'd target him, see, send him after Ho Chi Minh or local Cong sympathizers or Russian spies or whatever! We believe that he came back to the U.S. and was never able to reintegrate into normal society. He was driven to keep on killing. And he wasn't the only one. I was peripherally involved in a similar case, with another Vietnam vet perpetrator, in Indiana."

  Mo drove for a while in silence, now fully aware of where he was going and why, angry at Rebecca for withholding this information from him earlier. Wanting to confront her with the reality, the urgency, of what they were up against.

  "In other words," he said, "he was a puppet, basically operated by his superiors. And when his strings were finally cut, he just kept on doing what he'd been programmed to do."

  She seemed to notice where they were for the first time. "Where are we going? I thought you'd just drive around—"

  "I mean, really, who the hell would even think of broadcasting rabbits screaming? Where would you even get a tape of rabbits being slaughtered? You'd have to be a sicko to even think that one up."

  "Why are you angry at me, Mo? I can't see how I have in any way—"

  "Answer me, Dr. Ingalls." Mo drove them down the exit ramp and onto the side road. They were very close now. His anger rose, pressure he couldn't hold. "I don't know shrink vernacular, but let me be more scientific. Wouldn't you have to have a rather morbid imagination to think that one up—screaming rabbits? And what happened to all those experimental assassins? Isn't it possible some of them went into other areas of government work? Why not? Keep them on your side, keep them for possible future use, keep them quiet? Keep them off the streets? Suppose they were really very well organized, very smart, capable guys, very useful guys. Isn't it possible, Dr. Ingalls, that your Erik Biedermann's service in Vietnam was as one of these programmed assassins? Given that we know he was associated with, commanded, a black-ops hit unit! It was in Time magazine, okay? Isn't it possible that maybe in his own special way he's, what'd you say, 'failed to reintegrate' into normal society?"

  She was getting angry now, too. "I want you to turn around now, or tell me where we're going. Every time I get in a car with you, I'm

  practically abducted, Mo, and I'm not—"

  "I'm taking you to where you'll probably go tomorrow anyway, to do your 'color' thing."

  "I don't wish to go today, thank you—"

  "And isn't it possible that the reason you get called in on these cases is that your knowledge of these 'unintegrated' killer guinea pigs is an asset in the profiling you do? Your demonstrated willingness to keep quiet about it?" Mo yanked the car around a curve, jostling her against the door.

  "My 'demonstrated' . . . Mo, I can't prove—what am I supposed to—"

  "That in a way, you're whoring, too, you're given a nice incentive to keep quiet, with your nice fat consulting fee—"

  "That's it! That's unforgivable. You let me out of this car, or I'll

  press charges."

  But they were there. Mo pulled off and braked hard, the car skating to a stop on the gravel shoulder. A technical van, a couple of State Police cruisers, and St. Pierre's car were there. Mo shoved open his door and got out and went to sit on the guardrail with his back to Rebecca. He couldn't see anyone upstream, they were all out of view among the tortured sumacs. A hazy, milky sky hung over the flats, depressing as hell.

  After a while he heard her door open and close. He glanced to the side and saw her standing on the bridge, looking out over the marsh, a little wind tugging wisps of hair around her cheeks. He felt about as shitty as he could remember ever feeling.

  He gave it another minute, all he could take, and then went to lean against the railing near her. "I'm sorry," he said.

  She didn't acknowledge him.

  "I really want you to forgive me for losing it back there. For acting like you're to blame. It's just that a beautiful girl died out there, and I'm feeling bad about it. This stuff you're telling me scares the shit out of me. I want to do something about it, but I don't have any idea what to do. Will you look at me, please?"

  He was grateful that she did, eyes blue-gray and still very guarded.

  "I don't want to have a fight with you. I'm, I'm kind of . . . attracted to you. Not just 'attracted,' wrong word. Better than that."

  His vocabulary had completely stalled out on him. What was it about shrinks, he wondered, that they make you yammer this way? "I think you're really great, and I want you to . . . feel the same way about me.

  This was not how or wher
e he'd have preferred to say it. But her eyes warmed a little. Then she gazed back out over the scene.

  Something clicked for him then. "You're not disagreeing very hard. About Biedermann. There's something else, isn't there?"

  St. Pierre came into view, deep in the marsh, saw Mo, waved. Mo tipped his chin in acknowledgment. Rebecca turned away, arms still crossed. She walked across the bridge, staring at her feet, then came back to Mo.

  When she looked up at him, her eyes were wet, from the gritty breeze or what, he didn't know. "Thanks for saying all that," she said quietly. "For a cop, you handle your own emotions very well, did you know that? I think you're like me, you don't like beating around the bush when it's something that matters."

  "True. Thanks."

  "So I'm going to tell you something I shouldn't, and hope that you'll understand it. And hope that you'll work with me on what it means. Um, personally as well as professionally."

  "Anything."

  "We'll see about that." She grinned miserably. "So, Mo, what kind of sex do you like?"

  The question startled him. When he looked at her, she just seemed scared, not flirtatious or ironic. "Question like that, I have to wonder what you want, a straight answer or some—"

  "A straight answer."

  "I guess I like mutually satisfying, loving sex. Technique-wise, I guess I'm, uh, pretty conventional. Open-minded but probably pretty traditional."

  "Yeah, well, me, too. Well, you were right that Erik and I were an item," she said bitterly. "I was very lonely when I first came to New York, I don't want to go into the why of it. It ended for a variety of reasons. One of them was that we didn't . . . mesh . . . sexually."

  "Why are you telling me this?" He didn't want to hear it, didn't

  want to risk ruining things for them later.

  "Because one of the things he did that I didn't go for was, he wanted to tie me up."

  All Mo could do was stare at her.