Puppets

by Daniel Hecht

"I'm open-minded, too. I tried it the once. He used scarves. Didn't

  like it, just was not my personal. . . preference. Told him. He wasn't

  violent at all, just basic bondage, no pain or derogation or anything, just control. And he never suggested it again. But, you know, I thought, I couldn't help but think, afterwards. . . that given what we were working on, it was kind of. . . inappropriate? The resonances should have been a turrioff? They sure were for me."

  "You were working on Howdy Doody."

  She tossed her head, the I'm a fuckup gesture. "Yeah. A guy who tied people up."

  Rebecca took a few steps away, turned back looking sick in the muted sunlight. She blew out her cheeks. "I feel like I'm going to throw up. Didn't want to tell you this. I mean, it's such a lousy way to . . . But I felt I had to tell you. Didn't I? Under the circumstances?"

  He couldn't think of what to say. So he just took her arm, steered her back toward his car. Opened the door for her, let her settle numbly into her seat, closed the door. What he felt was a volatile mix of emotions: protectiveness of her, hatred of Biedermann, fear of what this could all turn into. A wild yearning barely reined in by caution and decorum and messy circumstances.

  When he'd gotten in, he turned to her. "So where do we go from here?" His voice was hoarse.

  "Good question," she said grimly.

  24

  THEY DROVE BACK TO Dale Shooting Center, caravanned into the city, left her car at her building's garage, went out to dinner. They weren't dressed for anything fancy, so they headed down Broadway and grabbed an Indian meal at a midtown cafeteria-style restaurant they both knew.

  They made a pact to not talk about Biedermann or the murders for the duration of dinner. And they didn't. She was good at keeping pacts, Mo decided, something else to admire about her. So at first they didn't

  say much, just watched the other patrons eating, the sullen-looking busboy clearing tables. Mo was thinking about what he'd said to her on the bridge, how he didn't know how to talk about feelings with words that were his own, not some cliche lifted from a movie or a novel. Attracted seemed shallow, cheap. Maybe he was uptight about trying to talk intelligibly to a Ph.D. Maybe, more likely, he just wasn't used to trying to find the right words for this, and maybe it was time to get some practice. You could get rusty in this. Looking back, he couldn't tell where the getting together with Carla had turned into the falling apart from Carla, the two were seamlessly merged or were the same thing. It had been a long time since he'd explored the vocabulary of love.

  But the storm in the car had broken through some restraint they'd

  both maintained. Some dam breaking. For a while there, they'd both been stripped pretty raw, but Mo liked what he'd seen of her. And he liked that he could be real with her and she still seemed to be moving toward him.

  "When we first met, you indirectly asked me a question," she said, interrupting his thoughts, "and I didn't fully answer you. I'd like to now, though."

  "I don't remember."

  She picked at her food. "Why I came to New York when I did, basically ending my relationship in Chicago. I was impressed that you picked right up on that."

  "You don't have to—"

  "No, this is fine." She shook her head, smiling again, some of the sunny warmth returning. "This is something I want you to know, something very important to me. Down in Decatur, I really was a hell-raisin' farmer's daughter of the old school. Got married when I was barely nineteen, had a daughter six months later. Marriage lasted about that long after, neither of us was ready at all. Just because of where I was at back then, Rachel went with her father. Later, he remarried and had a couple more kids, which meant that with him Rachel had siblings and a better nuclear family than I could offer. So we just kept to that arrangement, her living with him. But all these years, she's been with me every weekend. Then last year, my ex and his family and Rachel moved to New York—he'd gotten a big job at NBC. So there I was, with my practice and my boyfriend in Chicago, my beautiful daughter in New York. So I had to choose. Easiest choice I ever made—I couldn't live without her. And that's the answer to your question."

  He smiled with her. "Funny how the one thing we think of as a mistake at the time can later turn into the one thing we know isn't a mistake." Meaning, getting knocked up at eighteen.

  "I like that. A very nice insight, Mo."

  "So they live in Manhattan?"

  "New Jersey—just over the bridge. The only reason I was up at Dale shooting today was that Steve, that's my ex, and family are at his family reunion, back in Illinois, so I don't have Rache this weekend. And I miss her like crazy!"

  Mo chewed, thought about that. "Do I get to meet her?"

  "Maybe."

  That was okay, Mo decided, it was early and she didn't want to make mistakes where her daughter was concerned. He respected that.

  They talked about families and earlier years, and somehow Mo got into telling her about the graduate courses he'd taken over the years. Evening classes, an odd mix of subjects, no real intent to get a degree. Some English lit, his biggest pleasure had been reading The Canterbury Tales in Middle English: plain and simple, one of the world's great yarns. Then for a while he'd thought to get out of the investigative side of the job, maybe move over to more technical forensic work, so he'd taken a year of organic chemistry. That was a killer and he decided he'd get too impatient with lab procedure, at least out on the street you got to improvise now and again. Then a couple of Islamic Studies courses, mainly because he'd been hit hard by a book of Rumi's poems given to him by the first woman he'd lived with. Then career stuff again, a software aps course that was fun.

  After a while, Mo realized they'd been at the restaurant for a long time. Their talking was completely genuine, but part of him recognized it for what it was—stalling. They both knew that when they walked out of the restaurant, it would be night in Manhattan and they'd have to decide what they did next. And there was only one thing he wanted to do: to be closer to her, to rub up against her, to move on to a new level that he could tell was coming, inevitably, thrilling and scary in a good way. He was feeling irradiated by her again, only this time he couldn't fight it.

  Talk about chemistry, he thought dazedly.

  As usual, Rebecca faced it straight on. "It's getting late," she said reluctantly. "It's that point of the evening when people who like each other have to figure out what to do next, isn't it."

  "Yes," Mo said. He felt a little breathless.

  "Also the point at which big mistakes are often made," she went on, being very deliberate. "Mo, this has been great, but I raised enough impulsive hell in my first twenty years to last a lifetime. You and I have a lot more to talk about, and I'd love to bring you to my apartment where we can do it in privacy. But I need to be clear on issues of, what would you call it? Timing. Pacing."

  "You mean sex."

  She liked that he'd cut to the chase, it wasn't always her job. "I have a daughter to think about, I need to do things responsibly? Look like I've got some semblance of stability?"

  "Sure. Yeah, no, I understand completely."

  "Just for now—"

  "Bight. Of course."

  "Which isn't to say—"

  "No, it's fine. Honestly."

  That was such a blatant lie that they both had to laugh out loud. It felt good, real belly laughs. People's heads turned. When they were done and she had wiped the tears out of her eyes, they went out into the noise and light of Broadway at night.

  The tang of exhaust-scented May night air sobered her. She stopped and turned Mo toward her. "Mo, I'm serious about keeping an even keel. I've subjected Rachel to enough of Mom's emotional upheavals. We can go back to my place if you think we can both respect that." She searched his eyes, and, yes, he could see she was serious.

  "So stipulated," he said.

  For a moment, when her apartment door closed and they came out of the entry-hall light into the darker living room, all resolutions wavered. The dark was full
of a magnetic pull, and Mo took an involuntary step toward her. But then Rebecca hit the lights, tossed her purse, went into the kitchen to switch on the overheads.

  "Want something to drink?" she called.

  "Like alcohol?"

  She leaned back into the doorway to grin at him. "Like, yeah."

  So she opened a bottle of wine and brought it back into the living room with a couple of glasses. Her apartment was pretty and upbeat and comfortable and in good taste yet unpretentious. Eclectic furniture and colorful paintings, obviously the home of a person who bought things because she really liked them and not because they matched each other or proved anything. The big rug on the bright oak floor was an antique, blue-gray, braided oval, Midwestern chic that somehow worked nicely in this Big Apple apartment. On the bookshelf mantel were photos of Rebecca with a blond-haired child at different ages. One was a studio photo of a pale fifteen-year-old whose lips parted just enough to see the glint of braces.

  Rebecca sat at the far end of the couch, poured them each a glass of wine, and then followed his gaze. "That's Rachel. I have to tell you, she was prettier before she got her nose pierced. Honestly, maybe I'm

  old-fashioned, but I don't understand it, this ritual self-mutilation—"

  "She looks like a good kid. Very pretty, like you," Mo told her. Then he lied, "Really, you hardly notice the nose thing."

  But the words ritual and mutilation hung unhappily in the room. Rebecca frowned, acknowledging it. "So maybe it's time we talked about the . . . the problem. If there's any truth in what you're saying about Erik—"

  She stopped. But he knew she meant, Then we have to do something. Or maybe she was already a jump ahead and meant, Then we're both in danger if he thinks we suspect him.

  Mo tasted the wine, a crisp white that seemed to clear his head. Despite his body's longing for her, there was serious business at hand that couldn't wait.

  "I don't know what's going on here," he told her. "But I have to tell you, from day one, the whole thing of you being bait for a trap, that didn't hang together for me. It was too long a shot that the killer would take notice. That they put any credence in its working says to me they knew beforehand they were playing the scam to somebody who was inside the loop, who would for sure react."

  "But how does Erik fit into that at all? It was his idea!"

  "I don't know. But there's another thing that ties him in," he said. "Again, I'm not sure exactly how. But from everything I've heard about the night Ronald Parker came here, it sounds like big-time bungle, even for the FBI."

  "You could say that, yeah."

  "I mean, how did Parker get to this building without being noticed? How'd he get through the FBI's perimeter?"

  She nodded, sipped her wine, staring blindly into the whorl of the rug. "You mean, someone was helping him. Telling him what to look out for, how to get in and out. Or maybe screwing up my surveillance and protection just enough to let him through."

  "Where was Biedermann that night?"

  She looked really miserable. She swallowed, but didn't answer.

  "So he was on the detail here. Our hands-on, runs-a-tight-ship SAC."

  She nodded.

  Mo stood up, took a turn through the room. Bad enough to think that a highly placed federal agent could be a killer. Worse by far to think he would happily kill a woman he had been in a relationship with.

  Rebecca said, "Mo, I don't know anything about this end of criminal investigation. I'm a psychologist] I wouldn't have any idea how to prove or disprove something like this, or—"

  She looked so at a loss he knelt in front of her and held her shoulders, trying to think of something reassuring to say. "Look. I can't figure Biedermann's involvement, I mean, what, he's the killer, or he's one of several killers, or what, I don't know. But I don't

  believe this case is hopeless. We've got some very good leads in the power-station murder, it looks like Irene Bushnell was having an affair, we think it may be someone she was working for. This new guy, Biedermann or whoever, is deteriorating, he's making mistakes, we can come up on him with a traditional forensic approach. St. Pierre and I have drummed up a lot of leads, and I'm sure we're going to get DNA evidence from the Carolyn Rappaport murder. We're gaining on the son of a bitch, okay?" He spoke with more confidence than he felt.

  She just looked downcast, hopeless. "That was her name? Carolyn Rappaport."

  "And I've got some ideas how to help us figure out Biedermann. At the very least, it should be simple to implicate or clear him in direct participation in the murders."

  She raised her head. "How?"

  Mo hesitated, sensing this was not quite right but plunging on anyway. "Well. It involves you. There's something you can do better than I can."

  Now she sat straight and hugged her arms around herself, her eyes sparking, confusion and outrage mixed. "Gee, where have I heard this before? About how Jam perfectly positioned to catch the killer—if I'm willing to take certain little risks?"

  Mo realized what he'd done, that in his own way he'd recapitulated Biedermann's exploitation of her. The thought made him sick. "You're right," he said immediately. "I hadn't thought of it that way. Jesus. No, you're right, forget it, absolutely—"

  "Let's hear it, Mo." They locked eyes. "Go on and tell me your plan, I'll listen. That much I can promise, at least." She really was furious and said that last as if any other implied promises were now being reassessed, put on hold.

  25

  BUT IT REALLY WAS pretty simple. The best time, Mo had decided, would be Thursday, when they'd scheduled another "Pinocchio killer" task force meeting at the FBI offices—information sharing on the Carolyn Rappaport murder. There'd be a good crowd, and all Rebecca had to do was excuse herself from the conference room for five minutes and take a glance at Biedermann's personal calendar. She had only to ascertain where he'd been on the dates that Daniel O'Connor and Carolyn Rappaport were killed. Simple.

  Still, he'd left her apartment with the sense that he'd blown it. She'd cooled, she'd gotten stiff and formal. Keeping her distance from men who asked her to do dangerous things. He couldn't blame her. He'd been an idiot to suggest it. On the other hand, once he had, he couldn't dissuade her from going through with it. She had a lot of . . . what would they call it in the Midwest? Pluck.

  In any case, the plan left the first part of the week to make progress with the legwork. Monday began with a meeting with Mike St. Pierre, mainly to discuss Irene Bushnell, the power-station victim. Regardless of the other complications of the puppet murders, Mo felt, they had to build the case on the reliable bedrock of traditional criminology, forensic science, and logical deduction. Because, human cruise missile or not, Pinocchio was a flesh-and-blood man who had somehow come into Irene's physical proximity and gained control of her. And given that she had died at the power station, a place she was unlikely to spontaneously visit, at a time when her husband was driving his truck in Nebraska, Mo was willing to bet she'd had repeated contacts with the killer—enough for him to know something about her. Eventually, if you looked closely enough, if you played through the film of her last days, you'd see Pinocchio enter the frame, make contact.

  And St. Pierre was doing a tremendous job of connecting dots. By eleven o'clock, he had called all the people Irene Bushnell had worked for and had made up charts depicting every household's members, her work schedule, and her other contacts within the community. He began setting up the interviews and other background work that might help them identify Irene's supposed lover or murderer or both. Mo was grateful to have a methodical, focused young investigator doing this kind of homework, and he told St. Pierre so. Mike tried to conceal how much the praise meant to him.

  St. Pierre had gone to seed since the baby came. When Mo commented on it, he explained, "No sleep. Lilly and I got to get up five times a night." His eyes were tired, but there was a glow in them, too, which Mo assumed had to do with his new fatherhood. Mo had been given to understand that a nesting instinct took over wh
en you had a kid, you felt very close to your wife, priorities shifted, and so on. The tired but happy mammals. When Mike had come in this morning, Paderewski had commented on the puke stains on his shirt, and St. Pierre had looked proud rather than embarrassed. And yet he was still cranking out this great work.

  They split up and spent the afternoon talking to the clients Irene had been working for. By the end of the day, Mo had slogged through three go-nowhere, uncomfortable interviews: People got scared and tightened up when murder struck so close. The first client was a frazzled, red-haired mom of three carrot-topped kids in a massively ostentatious house in Briarcliff Manor, for whom Irene had cleaned Tuesday and Friday mornings. Among other details, she told him that she and the kids had always been there when Irene was, the husband always at work in the city. Scratch the possibility that hubby had been Irene's secret flame.

  The second client was a middle-aged couple, the Tomlinsons, who lived in an older house in downtown Ossining. They both worked in banking, the husband usually telecommuting because he was mobility-impaired, a member of the polio generation of the fifties and mostly wheelchair-bound. Without kids or pets, they didn't need cleaning often, so Irene worked there for just four hours every Monday, leaving around one o'clock for another of her jobs. They knew nothing about Irene's life. Mo found them dour and suspicious, and their house struck him as oppressively, overly tidy. They'd gone with a new cleaning company since Irene's disappearance.

  The last client was a single woman in her early forties, a lady exec at a hardware distributorship, and her aged mother. Neither knew anything about Irene's personal life, and they seemed to resent Mo's assumption that they might.

  A dead-end day. Mo thought of driving into the city to see Rebecca but then doubted that he'd be a welcome visitor. Back to Carla's mom's house. He decided he'd call Rebecca later, see how she was doing with some of the research she was planning to do on U.S. military psychological experiments.

  The thought occurred to him: It would be nice, someday, to have a more cheerful subject to discuss with her, a better excuse to call her.