Puppets

by Daniel Hecht

  The only movable objects in Parker's room were a collection of magazines, some toilet articles, and the TV remote, which were arranged along the edge of the stainless steel countertop: magazine, hairbrush, magazine, hand lotion, magazine, toothpaste, magazine, tissue box, magazine, remote. At one point, Rebecca pointed to the pattern and said, "That's pretty. That makes it better, doesn't it?"

  "Then it doesn't hurt," Parker said. "You have to get it right. It's important."

  Rebecca nodded. "When I was a kid, my mother used to make me straighten up the top of my dresser? I had all these plastic horses and I'd dump them there when I was done playing with them, in a great big tangle. I was supposed to have them in a row. She'd get so mad at me! I wouldn't get dessert if I didn't do it, and one time she called my father and he had to swat my bottom!" She chuckled ruefully at the memory. "What did they do to you if you didn't?"

  Parker had listened with growing intensity, and now his whole body was dancing to the nonexistent music again. He frowned and looked away. After a moment he stood up and began working at the counter, rearranging things.

  "I bet you had to get the strings on your wrists," Rebecca said quietly.

  Parker moved his hands hurriedly among the objects. Strong hands, Mo saw. He could see the faint discoloration of scarring on the wrists just below the cuffs.

  "I would hate that," Rebecca prompted. "That would make me very angry."

  Parker was rocking his whole body as he moved the objects into configuration after configuration. "Anger is an appropriate and necessary response," he said unexpectedly. "Provided you focus it. Your anger is a great source of energy. It's a source of power."

  Rebecca took the change of tone in stride. "Did you get angry when they did it to you?"

  "You answer their control first by asserting self-control and second by controlling them in return. You demonstrate your resistance in such a way so that no one will mistake the message."

  Parker's language had changed, Mo realized. His tone was firm, his grammar precise. It seemed not so much a spontaneous response as a lecture he had memorized.

  Rebecca had heard it, too, of course she had. She put one hand up onto the mesh that separated them, a reassuring gesture. "I'll bet it was your dad told you that! You know how I know? Because that's just how my dad talked."

  You didn't have to be a Ph.D. in psychology to see she had socked an arrow close to the bull's-eye. Parker gave her a different sort of look, a dangerous look. Yes, Mo thought, there was definitely a killer in there. For a moment the fluorescents buzzed in the silence of the room as Parker bobbed and shifted and glowered uncertainly at her. At last he lectured her sternly, "And you never, never talk about your daddy."

  Rebecca was right there with a reply: "Your daddy's name was Albert Parker, right?"

  Suddenly Parker was at the cell door, his big fingers clenched through the mesh and gripping Rebecca's hand. Mo moved to free her, but Rebecca shook her head, no.

  Parker's forehead pushed against the wire. He held Rebecca's fingers pinned, her skin turning white with the pressure as he continued to bore his gaze down at her. "Exactly right. Very good. My daddy was named Albert Parker," Parker echoed in his lecturing tone. His jaw muscles clenched.

  The pressure on her hand had to hurt, but Rebecca didn't show any response. "Did you love him?"

  "He did cruel things to me when I was a child, and he died of cancer in 1988 when I was twenty."

  "Cruel things like the strings on your wrists?"

  Parker yanked at the mesh so hard the whole door flexed and rattled in its frame, and his fingers dragged red lines across the back of Rebecca's hand. "I said, you never, never, talk about your daddyl" His eyes bulged out, as much with fear as with anger.

  Rebecca took back her injured hand and said soothingly, "Okay—"

  But Parker shouted her down. He was shaking the mesh in explosive convulsions, staring at her with red-rimmed eyes. "You're not getting this, are you! You don't know what the fuck you're dealing with, do you? You don't know how bad this is! I mean, we are talking about some very, very scary shit here, and you're sitting there like it's all normal, like you have the faintest idea of what the fuck you are talking about—!"

  Mo stood up and moved protectively toward Rebecca, but without looking toward him she gave him a tiny hand signal, wait.

  "Ronald, I'd like to understand, honestly I would. Can you tell me?

  But Parker was just shaking the door, teeth bared, eyes bulging as he pressed his face into the wire, really gone now. His fingers looked as if they'd tear off, bloodying the wire around the bent knuckles. Even Rebecca stood up and stepped away.

  And then with one last titanic convulsion it was over. Parker returned to the bed and sat, partially turned away, arms crossed over his heaving chest. Tears streaked his cheeks as he swayed and mouthed words and his feet made papery noises in their hospital slippers. For a few more minutes, Rebecca tried valiantly to soothe him, resume their friendly chat. But she was like a fisherman who'd had a big fish strike and slip the hook, casting and casting and pulling in nothing. She had lost him.

  When Dr. Iberson came in, they stood at the unit's exit door for a moment, looking across the room at Parker bobbing and swaying in his cell.

  "Ronald does this," Iberson said, "just shuts down if he feels we're too intrusive." He had been hurt by his exclusion from the interview, and now he glanced at Rebecca's scratched hand with what looked like satisfaction. "He's resistant to lines of discussion that strike him as manipulative or controlling."

  "Understandably," Rebecca said. She winced as she used a tissue to blot blood from the scrapes on her hand.

  The guard opened the door. Out in the hall, Iberson asked, "Do you still want to run any new diagnostics? We've done everything. You're probably interested in his CT scans, and you're welcome to look them over. But they won't tell you much except that he's got some damage in a dozen loci in each hemisphere. He's lucky he retained as much function as he did."

  "Thanks—it would be terrific to have copies." Rebecca gave Iberson a weary smile and put her hand on his arm. He brightened. But when they turned to walk down the hall, her mouth became a thin line. Blaming herself, Mo realized. Another way she was like him: a person who raked herself over the coals for her failures.

  Iberson was feeling better, eager to help her again. "And I suppose you'll want the tapes, too?"

  "Tapes?"

  "Observation tapes. He's fully monitored, audio and video.

  Suicide watch. It's set up like a bank security system, the tapes run for forty-eight hours and then record over themselves. Sometimes you can learn a lot from these stream-of-consciousness ramblings. I have to say, so far there's nothing informative, it's mostly dissociated gibberish. But you're welcome to copies of the current tapes. Or you could get copies of earlier tape cycles from the FBI. The SAC, Biedermann, he asks for copies pretty often."

  Rebecca seemed to find some energy. "Yes," she said, "thank you. Copies of the current tapes would be very helpful." And she gave Mo a glance that said maybe this hadn't been a total loss after all.

  34

  MO GOT TO REBECCA'S apartment at eight o'clock, wired with a nervous buzz. He had to tell her what he'd figured out, and it wouldn't be fun for either of them.

  They had arranged the rendezvous in the stupefying heat of the Rikers prison parking lot before getting into their separate cars. Mo had driven back to the White Plains barracks for a quick conference with St. Pierre. When he was done there, he headed back down to Manhattan. A lot of driving.

  Rebecca let him in and double-locked the door. She had changed into tan slacks and shirt, white socks, and had let her hair down. She led him into the living room and sat down on the couch. She didn't offer him a drink, and he didn't want one. There was work to be done.

  "Mo, this is getting scary for me. I think I know who Ronald Parker is."

  "Did you review the tapes Iberson gave you?"

  "Some of them. It
's time-consuming, you have to do a lot of fast cuing through quiet periods. I think you should listen to them, too. Maybe you'll find details I didn't, something relevant to the forensic side. But I. . .it almost doesn't matter. I think I know what's going on."

  They were sitting apart on the couch. Rebecca looked more worried than he had ever seen her, and he couldn't help reaching over and rubbing the knot between her brows, trying to smooth away the anxiety there.

  "I was thinking the same thing," he told her. "It'll be interesting to see if we came up with the same answer."

  She leaned into his kneading fingers, eyes shut. "You go first."

  He had to think about how to say it. The place where Ronald Parker, screaming rabbits, and puppet-puppet converged.

  "We're not dealing with Pinocchio here," he said finally. "We're dealing with Geppetto."

  She opened her eyes and blew out her cheeks. "Someone who makes puppets."

  "Yeah. This isn't a surviving guinea pig from the Vietnam experiments. This is one of the, what would they be, the doctors or psychologists. The puppet-makers, the puppet-masters—the guys who created the killers. He's made several of them. Ronald Parker is just one. There was another, before him, the kills in San Diego. Our copycat killer is a third. Could be five more, lined up and ready to She leaned away to look at him. "You're pretty smart. I'd like to know how you got there without a background in psychology."

  "A gut thing. I was obsessing about the ATF broadcasting the screams of rabbits being slaughtered at the Branch Davidians, and I thought, 'You gotta be a sick fuck to even think of that.' And I realized that the guys who were manufacturing these human cruise missiles back then had to be sick fucks. I don't know anything about the terminology here, but they'd have to be screwed up to accept a job like that in the first place. And they'd have to get even more screwed up by spending years twisting people's brains around. It makes sense that some of them would have reintegration problems when they came home, too. So that's what we've got here—a puppet-maker. Somebody who manufactures killers."

  The idea chilled the room, and they both pulled off into separate places to think about it. Mo had witnessed the terrible swath of suffering cut by even a single, isolated serial killer—not just murdering his victims but wounding the scores of relatives and loved ones who had to live with the loss and the dire knowledge of what had happened. But a manufacturer of killers, producing at will that twisted psychopathology, that carnage, again and again—it was almost unthinkably horrible.

  Rebecca shivered as if she'd thought the same thing. Her face was expressionless, eyes far away. Wheels turning. After a long time she asked, "When did you figure it out?"

  "Tuesday night. But seeing Parker today made me sure. When he was telling us about anger, he was quoting it more than saying it, like a lesson he had learned."

  Rebecca nodded. "There's more of that in the tapes. You see this kind of thing often with schizophrenia, when there's been so much delamination of the personality that the patient experiences his own thoughts as messages or instructions from some other source. But Parker is different. These phrases sound like real artifacts from a social transaction, a relationship. The other thing is his scans. There's a lot of damage, it's hard to isolate. But there are suspiciously symmetrical lesions, tiny, on his temporal lobes, a lot like the killer in Oregon. Ronald Parker has been . . . neurosurgically altered and deeply conditioned. Programmed."

  Mo got sick of sitting in the dark and reached over to switch on a lamp. Banish the shadows, he thought.

  "You put it together before we saw Parker, too, didn't you? The way you were zeroing in on the 'daddy' thing."

  She didn't answer directly. "Mo, did you ever have a dog?"

  "No. Apartment dweller when I was a kid. Why?"

  "Because if you ever take a dog to obedience school, the first thing you notice is that it's the human who's training who's learning, just as much as the dog. Obedience school conditions the actions of the masters as much as the dogs. The same is true of parenting psychology—to shape child behavior, the parent does an enormous amount of adapting, learning effective guiding behaviors, cultivating his or her own responses until they become a permanent program. The killers in the experiments had to have been extensively conditioned over a long period of time—and you're absolutely right, their programmers couldn't do that without being affected themselves."

  "Sounds right."

  "Also, there was another problem for me, aside from Ronald Parker's being too young to have been in Vietnam. For me, the killer's profile always seemed paradoxical. Obsessive, very rigid killing ritual, apparently anchored in past trauma and driven by deep emotions. Right? But I always felt it was too easy for us to pull Ronald Parker in—to get him to target me. I would never have thought the Howdy Doody killer was so susceptible to a proactive trap. But Erik insisted he would be, and he was right! Because behind Parker was a deliberate mind, a very intentional personality with a reasoned motive. With an agenda that he needed to protect. That's who was threatened by me. Ronald Parker and this new one, they're just as much puppets as their victims!"

  "Meaning that this Geppetto, this master puppet-maker, programmed Parker to go after you. Retargeted him." And the insider scenario was just Biedermann's contrivance, a way to explain the similarity of the MOs and an excuse to clamp down hard on information. Thinking about it, Mo suddenly remembered Carla's

  "vision": the dark place with the puppets behind puppets behind puppets. Carolyn Rappaport, Daniel O'Connor, Irene Bushnell: turned into puppets by conditioned killers who were themselves puppets of the master puppeteer.

  "But it's not Erik Biedermann," he said.

  She looked surprised, and he realized he had a lot more to tell her. So he described Biedermann's late-night visit and his conversation with Zelek at the Zoo.

  "And you believe them?" Her eyes had reddened and tears rimmed her lower lid, but now she wiped them away and looked a little stronger.

  "Yeah. Biedermann could have killed me, and he chose not to. I think they told me the truth—just not the whole truth."

  "Which is that he and Zelek, they're trying to 'clean up' a . . . a Geppetto."

  Seeing her rallying, Mo ached to hold her. But he had determined he'd let her lead. And hugs and smooches weren't quite appropriate under the circumstances. Instead he got up and went to the windows. He stared out at the street, drumming his fingers on the sill. The sun was down, the glowing sky casting the shadows across the street, obscuring the pedestrians and car traffic below. Everybody had a furtive, scuttling look from this angle. For all he knew, one of them was the puppeteer, watching the building right now.

  "You said the puppet-maker has an agenda," Mo asked her reflection in the glass. "What's the agenda?"

  "Don't know. Yet. I'm working on it."

  Mo lingered at the window. He was counting the ways they were in danger. Geppetto already knew Rebecca was involved in the case, knew where she lived. He had at least one programmable killer, the one they were calling Pinocchio, out there already. Probably had more than one.

  His first thought was that they should tell Biedermann that they knew. But that brought up the other issue. Zelek had called it right, he'd never dealt with anything this serious, this big. Nothing even close. And he had no idea how to fix it, whom to tell or not tell, how to avoid the danger that seemed to be closing in.

  Mo switched on some more lights. Rebecca made some coffee, and they each drank a cup as they worked over the problem for another hour.

  Yes, Ronald Parker's wrist and ankle scars were the result of past trauma, and, yes, he inflicted that same trauma on his victims. But it wasn't a childhood trauma. It was from his conditioning period, the twenty months between his disappearing from his bank job and his resurfacing as the Howdy Doody killer.

  "That's good to note," Rebecca said. "Because it gives us an idea how long the conditioning process takes. Means we can work backwards from the date of this new one's first kill, let's assume
for now it's the power station murder, and get a rough idea when he was acquired by Geppetto. Look for someone who went missing about two years before Irene Bushnell's death." She got out her year planner, then rummaged in her briefcase for a legal pad.

  Mo just looked at her. She had come back quickly from the dazed and frightened phase. With a little shock, he recognized her state of mind: She had the bloodhound instincts. Part of her roused quickly to the challenge of the hunt.

  "Jesus," he said. "You're a lot like a . . . a cop."

  "How's that?" She looked up from the pad where she'd begun graphing out a calendar of the puppet-maker's activities.

  He gestured at the page. "What you're doing now. You're getting off on the thrill of the chase. This's what . . . what I do."

  "Should I assume that's a compliment?" She flashed him a sardonic grin. A shrink's comment on his mixed feelings about himself and his job.

  They kept at it, turning it over, trying on scenarios. A couple of issues kept coming around.

  "Okay," Mo said. "The thing of the repetitive MO. Why do these guys, the killers, do it the same way every time?"

  Rebecca bit her upper lip, gave it a moment's thought. "One reason might be that they're recapitulating the trauma of the conditioning process—they're doing to their victims what the puppet-maker did to them. But I don't think that's enough to explain it. I can only assume the MO is part of the programming they've received. They not only experienced that same trauma, they were instructed, programmed, to reenact it just so."

  "Why?"

  She frowned again. "That brings us back to the puppet-maker's agenda."

  Which they could only guess at.

  By ten o'clock they'd been talking for two hours and had begun going in circles. Soon they'd have to quit, Mo thought, save it for when they were fresh. But there were still a couple of things to discuss.