Puppets (29 page)

Mr. Smith had reclaimed him for a month of intensive conditioning that he'd hoped would get him back on track, and after the O'Connor kill he thought he'd succeeded. But then, right away, the bungle in the marsh. Again the rape, leaving biological evidence and other anomalies a sharp investigator like Morgan Ford could capitalize upon.

But what was really unacceptable was the proximity of the Rappaport thing to the lab. A couple of lingering questions there. One,
how
—how could Three have found his way back, given that he'd been tied up and blindfolded for the trip in and out? Probably, Mr. Smith guessed, just a matter of deduction: During their work in the old dump, Three would have heard the highway noise, had seen the stream and the nearby hills, could determine direction from the sun and moon. Maybe he had calculated drive time when he was released. A look at topographical maps would have allowed him to identify probable locales.

But then you had to ask
why
—why the
hell
had the little creep come back to the area? It suggested that Three was up to something on his own. Maybe looking for Daddy, a little payback? Or maybe just wanting to emulate Daddy more perfectly, perform his own "conditioning exercises" in the old junkyard?

The more Mr. Smith thought about it, the more it infuriated him. The artery in his neck ballooned against his collar. His heart pounded like a power-hammer, his hands ached for forceful action. But then headlights washed the front of the garage again and this time stayed. Just as he recognized the throaty exhaust note of the Porsche, the electric garage-door opener clunked on and the door began to roll up. A widening stripe of headlight glare lit the garage. Mr. Smith stepped back into the stairwell shadow.

It took a long time for Three to get out of the car. The garage door rolled down behind him, but he just sat in there, lit by the car's dome light, fussing with something on the seat. Then he cracked the door but didn't get out, leaving the key alarm buzzing.
Drunk,
Mr. Smith thought impatiently.

Finally Three swung the Boxster's door open and unfolded from the low car. But the alarm still buzzed, he'd forgotten the key and had to bend back inside to retrieve it. Seizing the moment, Mr. Smith stepped quickly from the stairwell and came up behind him. He grabbed Three's belt and yanked him backward so that his head hit the car roof as he came out. Still, Three was a big boy, strong as an ox, and even drunk he took the hit and managed to half-turn, bringing an elbow around to connect with Mr. Smith's temple. Sparks and flashes, a hard hit.

The pain enraged Mr. Smith, and he kicked Three's legs out from under him with a slashing sideways sweep of his foot. Three went down clutching the Boxster's door frame, and in an instant Mr. Smith twisted his Asp out of its breakaway holster. It was a specialty police tool, a telescoping steel baton that would expand from six inches to sixteen with a flick of the wrist. For this job he left it short. With one knee on the angled back, he hooked his right thumb into Three's ear and drove the Asp's steel tip into the hinge of the jaw, up into the sensitive mastoid region. A little downward jerk and the leverage was wonderful. Three squealed like a pig and slid further down the door frame.

He was mostly on the floor now. Mr. Smith kept the pressure on the Asp as he maneuvered the head into the back corner of the car's door frame, then swung the door shut. Three lay belly-down on the concrete, his head wedged between door and frame, face ground into the door sill. Once he had the head secure, Mr. Smith took away the Asp, sat on Three's rump, and leaned into the door as he pulled the arms up behind and cinched on the nylon handcuffs. He felt some satisfaction, but part of him was angry that it had been so easy. He'd have preferred an excuse to really punish the little shit.

He gave the door some more pressure. Three squealed again, but the big torso didn't budge. The slightest movement would be agony.

Mr. Smith gave it a full two minutes. Then he bent his face close to the corner of the door. "What do we say?" he whispered.

Number Three's voice had a choked sound, his jaw barely able to work in the vise of steel. But he managed wonderfully, considering: "Thank you, Daddy. Thank you, Daddy. Thank you, Daddy."

37

M
O SAT IN A storage room in the basement of Ty's precinct building in the Bronx, looking at the wall of cardboard file boxes. More paperwork on the Howdy Doody case—Ty had shown him down here to look over the more peripheral Rosario materials, destined for warehousing or incineration after the trial. The walls were shiny beige like the rest of the station, but the paint was flaking here, and the absence of windows and the dust-fluffed pipes crossing the ceiling made it a depressing place. It was dead quiet except for the occasional flush of a toilet upstairs and the rush of water through the pipes.

Looking at the sagging stacks of boxes, he was tempted to call it quits on this avenue of pursuit. He was feeling an ache, his brain or mind being torqued out of shape by this. Going from the sweetness to the job so hard, so fast. He wondered how she was doing today. Missing him? Morning-after regrets? In any case, anything these files might have to offer had been superseded by developments. There was no insider to look for because the consistent MO resulted not from the killer being a law-enforcement person involved in the case but from consistencies in Geppetto's programming of his killer puppets. Which was derived from whatever agenda he might have.

Still, he figured he might as well finish the job. Deep background, you never knew what would pop up. He put the first of eight boxes up on the table and began pulling out folders. Ah, yes, the glamour of homicide investigation. Whodunits generated a lot of paper, enough to drown in. This box was full of irrelevant memos, the daybooks where Ty's investigators had written up all the dead-end interviews and other useless leads, copies of correspondence with other jurisdictions involved in the first task force. Minutes from meetings, mainly noting attendees and procedural decisions and noticeably lacking discussion of important evidence, no doubt pursuant to Biedermann's gag rules. Copies of letters to and from the Manhattan DA's office, pressuring letters from the mayor's office, pleading or angry letters from the victim's next of kin.

The second box contained reams of printouts from national crime databases that compared MOs, victimology, and path reports with other murders throughout the country. Then a collection of the usual whoopee-nutso confessions and psychic leads called in by attention-starved citizens who had read about the case in the newspapers. On and on. From the materials here, it looked like Ty's investigators had done a damned good job of following down a thousand dead ends.

End of second box. He stuffed the papers back in haphazardly, frustrated. Face it, the real reason he was here: He was stalling. Killing time with busywork while he tried to figure out what to do.

Flannery's secretary had called and ordered another command appearance before the DA this afternoon, but Mo had no idea what to tell him. On the regular forensic front, there was nothing to report. At the same time, there was too much to tell: human cruise missiles, army psych experiments, clandestine government hit units, Geppetto. Without a grip on all that, Mo didn't know what to say or not to say.

Plus, he'd heard the DA was planning to ask the Big Willie grand jury for a second-degree murder indictment against him, the stiffest possible charge under the circumstances. Marsden had given him a heads-up on it this morning. Mo had faced reality and called his rep from the State Police Investigators Association, who had set up a meeting with a union attorney for early next week.

He dumped out the third box on the table, thinking,
Fucking
Flannery.

The thought stopped him. Actually, maybe there was something interesting in that first box. He put away the papers he'd just dumped, set the first box back on the table.

It had to do with the routine correspondence. Here were photocopied notes from the New Jersey police departments working on the first Howdy Doody kills, before Parker had started up in Manhattan. By the dates, Ty had apparently requested the New Jersey materials after the murder in his precinct, which occurred about six months after the first New Jersey kill. Memos, distribution lists, summaries of early findings. What drew Mo's eye were the CC lists, where Westchester DA Richard K. Flannery's name now stood out like a sore thumb.

Mo opened his notebook to look at the calendar of puppeteer kills. CC'ing Flannery after only the second New Jersey kill, in April of '99? Why so soon? How would Flannery even have heard about a specific murder or two that occurred outside his jurisdiction, across the river in New Jersey?

Mo felt his pulse quickening as other details came to mind. Flannery: bald now but blue-eyed, suggesting he had been blond once. Big, very fit—Geppetto would have to be fit to manipulate his experimental subjects. Flannery, in his late fifties, the right generation to have had a role in Vietnam-era psych projects. Flannery, who, if memory served, had a medical background before going into law—giving him the skills needed for the role of puppet-maker. And, right, Flannery, who personally knew the family of Carolyn Rappaport, murdered in the swamp, a connection no one had even thought to look at twice. Flannery, who hadn't wasted a moment getting Mo Ford under his thumb, thus getting an inside man on the State Police side of the investigation and conceivably a means to subtly deflect the direction of the investigation. Who knew how many others he was manipulating in similar ways?

Mo cautioned himself not to get excited, but his hands were shaking as he reviewed the rest of the papers. You couldn't deny there was a pattern here. Flannery had been copied on Howdy Doody communications starting immediately after the second New Jersey kill. True, the second murder would have suggested it was the start of a serial string and could conceivably have aroused a nearby DA's interest. But why—and how—so soon? And as Mo checked the lists of meeting attendees, he saw that Flannery showed up personally at a surprising number of them. Why had a very busy DA allotted so much time to a single case not yet in his jurisdiction?

By the time he looked up, it was eleven-thirty. He was due to meet Flannery at three o'clock. The thought of facing him after this gave his nerves a jolt.

He tried to calm himself by remembering the mistake he had made with Biedermann. But then he calculated that, allowing for drive time back to White Plains, he had about two hours free. Just enough time for a visit to the New York Public Library, some background research.

The secretary at Flannery's office told him the DA was downstairs, in the fitness center the county maintained for its staff. He was expecting Mo, she said, in one of the racquetball courts. Mo took the elevator to the basement, followed signs through the windowless corridors to the gym area. Three o'clock, a fine day in early June, hardly anyone else was using the facility. Mo turned a corner, heard the echoing
whap
POCK!
of a ball, and followed the sound to Flannery.

He watched for a moment from the corridor. The courts were new, with floor-to-ceiling glass rear walls that allowed observation of games. Flannery was alone in the brightly lit white box of a room, his back to Mo, wearing shorts and a gray T-shirt darkened with sweat. He was knocking a handball against the other wall with sharp sweeps of a gloved palm, moving laterally with quick, wide steps.
Ka-pack!
Pa-whack!

The visit to the library had been productive in a circumstantial way. Mo had said hello to the pollution-stained lions, friends from his youth, and gone inside to the periodicals section. He had decided to begin scanning papers from five years ago, the year before Flannery became Westchester DA. The
Journal News
was there in microfiche, which was a pain, requiring him to mechanically scan frame after frame of newspaper pages. But even so, it didn't take long to find Flannery's name here and there. Most of it was unremarkable, but he did learn a few interesting facts. Flannery had been born and raised in Westchester. He had gone to medical school at Johns Hopkins, but he'd joined the army rather than setting up in private practice after graduating. As a medical officer, he'd served several years at Wainwright Army Hospital in Georgia and a number of shorter stints at hospitals in Vietnam. After the war, he quit medicine, went to law school, and joined the public prosecutor's staff. Why the switch? "For me, medicine and law aren't really so different," the new DA was quoted as saying nobly. "They both stem from a sincere desire to serve my fellow man."

Mo jotted in his notebook:
Family home in
Westchester
—
where?
And:
Wainwright Army
Hosp.
—
What duties?
Was it by any chance where the army ran its monster-making factory?

Another profile from the
Daily News:
WESTCHESTER'S MOST
ELIGIBLE BACHELOR LIKES LIMELIGHT BUT GUARDS PRIVATE LIFE.
Flannery, though maintaining high visibility at work, jealously protected his personal affairs. Kept an apartment in White Plains and another in Manhattan where he could better escape public scrutiny. Didn't entertain much, kept his love life out of public view. The famously charming, outgoing DA admitted with typical lack of affectation that he had a sensitive, introverted side that was not permitted much expression in his public service career. Touching.

After last night's revelations, Rebecca had started developing a psych profile for Geppetto. Mo wasn't sure what she'd end up with, but surely this had to be close—the two-sided personality, the double life, the lack of close domestic relationships.

The
New York Times
search turned up a number of references to Richard K. Flannery. Again, they were mostly routine, dealing with politics in the Empire State. The most interesting article was a postelection editorial comment that suggested Flannery's meteoric rise owed less to his abilities than to help from powerful outside political influences, the governor's office or maybe even Washington. Connections in the intelligence community? Mo wondered. An old-boy network of former monster-makers helping one of their own? Mo watched the big man pounding the ball, the powerful stoop of the torso and the wicked chop of the right arm, trying to visualize him as the puppet-master.

Yes,
he decided, he could see it.
Definitely.

But there were several problems with the idea, too. Not the least of which was that if Mo Ford could dig up this much suggestive material in two hours, SAC Biedermann would surely have done so long ago. And apparently hadn't thought it worth his while.

On the other hand, maybe they
were
looking at Flannery. Maybe they knew they needed a very solid case against a powerful DA, and it was taking time. Maybe this was one of the "big picture" issues Mo was supposed to turn a blind eye to.

Flannery spotted Mo, snagged the rebounding ball, beckoned him into the court. Mo obediently opened the low door and ducked inside. An air-conditioned gust blew in from ceiling vents, but the room was still full of the musky smell of male sweat.

Flannery's chest was pumping as he came up and chucked Mo on the shoulder. "Thanks for coming. You ever play?"

"A little, back in high school—"

"Hey, there we go!" Flannery grinned. "Let's whack a few. I've got an extra glove."

"No, thanks."

Flannery's smile faded. "You know, you look pretty tense, Ford. Maybe you ought to try it—work some of it out. Bang that ball, it's very cathartic. Take the edge off some of that tension." He turned to rummage in an athletic bag in one corner of the room, came back with a handball glove. He slapped it into Mo's hand, gave him a baleful look. "I insist. We'll bat it around while you tell me what's bothering you."

Mo held the glove but made no move to put it on. "I hear the grand jury's going to get a request for a second-degree murder indictment against me."

Flannery's face blackened at Mo's refusal to play. He turned away and served the ball hard against the wall so that it leapt back at Mo. A provocation. Mo turned reflexively so that it hit him on the shoulder and bounced away.

Flannery sprang to retrieve it. "I'm doing you a favor with that. I could maybe make manslaughter stick, but the jury'll never go for second degree, they'll have to let you go. Best of both worlds; I make the relatives happy, I get you off the hook. I thought you'd
be grateful
I'd set it up this way. But
no,
that's too much to ask, I guess." Again Flannery smacked the ball so that it came back at Mo. Ready this time, Mo stepped aside.

Flannery caught the ball as it came offthe back wall. "What other bug you got up your butt?" He still didn't look at Mo, just whacked the ball so that it came back at Mo's head. This time Mo grabbed it on the fly.

"No bug," Mo lied. "But we haven't made any progress to tell you about. Things are stalled at this point."

"How about your visit to Ronald Parker down at Rikers? Nothing at all useful from that?" Flannery's red face betrayed some pleasure at telling Mo he knew about that. "Your cell phone still work? Because I know for a fact you have my number, and you ain't called me recently, have you?"

Mo decided not to react to the goading, not to ask how he knew. "Parker is incoherent. He's all over the map. If we'd learned anything relevant, I'd tell you."

Flannery bit his lower lip and thought about that. He took another ball out of his pocket, served it at the wall, slapped it back and forth several times. The big torso dominated the small room, moving quickly sideways, apparently oblivious to Mo. Flannery lunged so close Mo could feel the heat emanating from him. And then, without turning his head, Flannery whacked the ball so that it came back at Mo's face again. Mo snapped it out of the air with his left hand and simultaneously fired the other ball at the wall. The move caught Flannery by surprise. The ball came back and hit him squarely in the chest.