Puppets (31 page)

39

M
O WAS FLAT ON HIS back in bed, the Glock in its holster cradled on his chest, when the phone rang. He groped for it in the dark, knocked it off the night table, found it again. The clock radio said 1:02 A.M. He'd only been asleep for six minutes.

"Gus?" he barked.

"Investigator Morgan Ford?" a woman's voice.

"Yeah."

"This is Sergeant Renee Williams, Troop K headquarters. There's a situation in Briarcliff Manor. We've got an armed standoff in a residential neighborhood, a hostage situation, shots have been fired. The suspect has asked for you personally. Can you get out there soon?"

"Who the hell? I mean, why
me?"
Mo couldn't imagine who would be desirous of seeing Morgan Ford, personally, at something like this.

"The officers on the scene say it's apparently a marital problem, a triangle? It's at the home of a Dennis Radcliff?" She paused, and when Mo's silence suggested the name didn't ring a bell, she went on, "The suspect hasn't been positively identified yet, but we're presuming he's the owner of a Toyota pickup truck parked on the lawn of the residence. A Byron Bushnell?"

Driving around the Sleepy Hollow Country Club at one-thirty A.M.: big houses and landscaped yards shadowed by heavy summer foliage. Mo drove quickly but without a flasher through the quiet streets. He had come fully awake the instant Sgt. Williams had mentioned Byron Bushnell's name. It meant he'd been right when he thought he saw that flash of understanding in Bushnell's face during their last interview. The grieving husband realizing, yes, his dead wife had been having an affair. Yes, it was with one of her cleaning clients. Yes, it was that rich guy she went to on Monday afternoons, the side income Irene kept secret from Mrs. Ferrara. And maybe the rich guy was the bastard who killed Irene.

Mo had been wondering what to do about his hunch ever since the interview, but now Byron Bushnell had solved that problem for him. Byron had obviously decided he wasn't going to leave this to the police, he'd settle things himself.

Deaver Street was spangled with the strobes of a dozen police cars.

Sawhorses had been erected to close off the block, and Mo had to show his shield to a State Police uniform to get past. Closer, he saw that the cars had trained their spots on the front of a big brick house set back in manicured lawns, lighting the place up like a movie set. Jagged holes gaped in two front windows of the house. Several police snipers crouched behind cars, rifles mounted with fat nightscopes and trained on an open bay in the attached garage, where the tail end of a sports car was visible. A trio of ambulance vans waited down the street, and there were probably twenty other cops in sight, many of them the serious cowboys from the Mobile Response Team. The night air was alive with flashers, headlights, the electric crackle of radios.

Just past the end of the driveway, a bunch of local and State Police brass were conferring soberly, including State Police captain Max Dresden, whom Mo knew slightly. They gestured him over to their conference, and Mo nodded hello.

"So apparently this guy's some good friend of yours," Dresden said.

"Where is he now?"

"Maybe the garage, maybe the house."

"Is the owner of the house inside?"

"We're not sure. At this point, we're presuming he's being held hostage."

Mo craned his head to look over what he could see of the scene from this angle. Through the hedge he could see Byron Bushnell's battered white Toyota, pulled haphazardly onto the lawn.

Dresden filled him in on how it had gone down. Neighbors had called in a report of shots being fired. The Briarcliff police had come, found the suspect on the front lawn, waving a handgun, shooting at the house windows, yelling something about his wife, about murder. When he saw the Briarcliff car, he took a shot at it and blew out a rear side window. The locals called for reinforcements. By the time the State Police had arrived, the suspect had entered the garage and probably the house. He'd fired at them again from the garage door.

They had sent men into the yards on either side and the golf course in back, cutting off any escape, and a hostage/barricaded-subject specialist from Poughkeepsie had gotten on the bullhorn, trying to talk him down. The suspect was obviously drunk and upset and had responded by saying he hated all cops and he'd kill Dennis Radcliff and himself and anyone and everyone else nearby. He'd taken another shot at the hostage specialist. The MRT shooters were afraid to return the fire, given the hostage possibility. After a while Bushnell had apparently begun feeling scared and overwhelmed. He'd cried and raved and eventually had asked for Investigator Morgan Ford.

After he finished, Dresden waited expectantly for Mo to explain. His look suggested he wasn't one of Mo's fans.

"I interviewed him a couple times on a murder case," Mo said. "I didn't realize we had hit it off so well."

"So how do you think we should do it?"

"You've got to call your men down. It's imperative that we get Byron and the other guy, this Dennis Radcliff, alive." Mo tried the name on his tongue:
Dennis Radcliff.
Very possibly, Pinocchio's real name. At last. If they could take him alive, he'd be the first direct link back to Geppetto. Who was
not
Ty, not not not, couldn't be.

But the circle of cop brass was still looking at him expectantly, so he went on, "Bushnell is the husband of Irene Bushnell, a murder victim. He's grieving, and he probably believes this Radcliff guy is the one who killed his wife. He may be right. In his current condition, yeah, he's capable of anything. I'll try to talk to him. But whatever he does,
do not
kill him. We got to be clear on this, or I can't help here."

Mo drove the point home with his eyes. You didn't usually give orders to captains, but Dresden barely hesitated before relaying the message to his people.

Mo started toward the house but turned back. "Two more things. When we go in there, we've got to secure the whole house. Touch nothing, consider it all evidence. The garage, the basement, the attic, whatever. Your guys have got to know this, no hotdogging in there. Also, get on the phone, get Bushnell's mother-in-law out here—a Mrs. Drysdale, Tarrytown number. If it doesn't work out with me, maybe she can do something."

Mo walked to the end of the driveway and stood in full view of the house. He could feel the tension rise in the cops around him, the visible ones and ones hidden around the yard. The spotlights stretched his shadow along the driveway, stark and solitary.

"Hey, Byron!" he yelled. "It's Mo Ford."

There was no sound from the house.

"Byron, look at me. I'm putting my gun down right here in the driveway. You see it? I'm not armed."

No answer.

"Hey, Byron, come on. This is the pits, man! We got to get you out of there."

After a minute, he heard a muffled voice from inside: "He killed her! He's the one who killed her!" It wasn't clear if the voice came from the open garage bay or the blown-out house wdndow nearest the garage.

"If he did, I want him as much as you do. We're on the same side here. Can I come in and talk to you?"

A long hesitation. Indecision.

Mo took a few steps. "Is he in there with you right now?"

A clunk of something falling over. Swearing. Then Bushnell's voice, choked with grief and frustration: "No! He's not here!

Fucker's not here!"

A palpable sense of relief gusted through the police army in the street, but all Mo felt was disappointment:
no Pinocchio.
"Okay. So let me come in, and you can tell me what—"

"They're just gonna kill me, aren't they. Think I don't know how this works? Fucking cops, man, all my life—"

"Nobody's going to kill you. We need you to help us find him. Right? You'll be fine." Mo took a few more measured steps. He was ten paces away from the garage door. He was pretty sure the voice came from there. With somebody as unglued as Bushnell, he knew this could still go either way.

Bushnell didn't answer, just kept up his choked swearing. So Mo kept walking.

When he got to the open garage door, the glare of the spotlights made it hard to see into the shadows. There was the sports car, a Porsche, and to the left a flight of two steps leading to a door into the house. A dark shape crouched behind the open door, gun in hand. From this close, Mo could feel the poor bastard's misery, an aura of suffering.

For a moment they both stood without moving in the light-slashed dark. Finally Mo asked quietly, "You sure he's not in there?"

"Yeah."

"So let's get out of here. First we'll get you out of the hot seat, and then we'll figure out where he is."

"How we gonna go out?"

"You put down your gun. Then we go out together."

"They'll
shoot
me. Maybe I'll fucking just kill myself. I don't need this shit!
This
I do
not
need, man." Crying.

"No one's shooting anybody. You come here, you and me will hold on to each other. But first your gun's got to go. Just leave it on the step. Those guys out there, they see the gun and they'll get nervous. Shoot us both."

More indecision. Mo could hear him breathing and swallowing, the wet sound of someone who's crying and scared to death.

It took a few more minutes of back and forth. Finally Bushnell stepped out from behind the door into the half-light.

"All right," Mo said encouragingly. "You're doing fine." He looked to make sure the gun was on the step, then turned his back to Bushnell. "Come up here, hug me from behind. Put your arms around me from either side, but keep your hands up in front of me so the guys out there don't get worried." Not SOP, but he was sure Bushnell wouldn't come without some shelter. "Okay? Byron, you hearing me?"

Bushnell didn't answer, but Mo felt shaking arms come shyly around his sides. They tottered awkwardly out into the doorway like that. Stood in the spotlights.

"We're coming out!" Mo yelled. The lights blinded him. "The suspect is unarmed! I need confirmation you hear me."

An amplified voice: "Confirmed. We hear you. Snipers are standing down."

They shuffled blindly out toward the street. Mo could feel Bushnell's trembling breathing against his back. He was several inches shorter than Mo, so that his head came against Mo's back like a woman's. The guy was holding on for dear life.

Mo Ford, human life-preserver,
he thought. And then they were at the street, and the figures of cops were coming around them, and Byron Bushnell was pried loose from his body. Already men were running toward the house.

"Keep it intact!" he yelled after them. "Keep everything intact! It's a lot bigger than it looks!" He meant the whole scenario. He realized suddenly that he was tension-torqued to the fucking moon, and nothing he was saying would make any sense to them at all.

40

I
T WAS JUST AFTER noon Saturday by the time Mo got to Rebecca's apartment. His nervous system was doing a shaky tightrope act between the high of coffee mixed with adrenaline and the exhaustion of thirty anxious hours without sleep. He had stayed through the night at Dennis Radcliffs house, searching through the entire structure along with other investigators and forensic technicians, and he'd spent a half hour in a car talking with Byron Bushnell, learning nothing new. Luckily, neither Biedermann nor Flannery had shown up to complicate things.

At eight in the morning, after thinking it through, Mo had called Flannery on his cell phone. Theoretically, it was to act the part of the dutiful slave at last, keeping the DA informed of developments. But it was also a way of avoiding any appearance that he was suspicious of him. Plus he'd casually asked Flannery where he was, did he want to come to the crime scene, how soon could he get here? Didn't mean anything either way, but there'd been no hesitation or awkwardness as Flannery claimed to be at his Manhattan apartment, yeah, he'd take a peek at the scene but it'd be a couple of hours.

Finally, as a grudging afterthought, he'd thought up a pretext and called Ty at the Bronx apartment he shared with his sister. Sister was there, Ty was not. She didn't know where he was, but she'd take a message.

Whoever was Geppetto, there could be no doubt that Radcliff was Pinocchio. In the garage, they'd found a black duffel bag containing a roll of lawn-trimmer line, nylon handcuffs, extra eyelets. They'd also gotten hair from hairbrushes, which he was sure would eventually match DNA evidence from the Carolyn Rappaport scene.

But Radcliff himself was gone. Which meant no easy link back to Geppetto. For now the best Mo had was a tuft of short blond hair, sticky with blood, that he'd found on the bottom corner of the Porsche's driver's-side door. Mo's gut told him that Dennis Radcliff had been reacquired by Geppetto. They had probably only missed him by a matter of hours.

He called Rebecca reluctantly, this being her day with Rachel, but as it turned out they would be able to meet. Rache and some friends were going to go to a matinee. Rebecca explained ruefully that while moms liked to see their teenage daughters as much as possible, teenage daughters weren't as highly motivated to grab quality time with moms, especially since weekends were also when they could hang out with their friends. The call of the wild, Mo said, sometimes you just had to give them their freedom. Rebecca wasn't all that amused.

Rachel and her friends were leaving the building just as Mo arrived. The three of them trouped across the lobby as he came through the door, Rachel and a Goth-dressed girl and a Hispanic girl, all of them with made-up faces and a conspiratorial flash in their eyes. The shine of anticipation. Hitting the streets, fifteen years old, a little cash in your pocket, Manhattan waiting—Mo remembered the feeling. Rachel saw him and her face changed, guardedness concealing the spark like a shade drawn over a window.

"Hey," Mo said.

"Hi," Rachel mumbled. She didn't seem to want some big transaction just now, so Mo didn't slow her down with any other pleasantries. In a second they were past each other. As the girls went out, Mo heard her tell her friends, "He's like my mom's
boyfriend."
An exasperated tone of voice.

That was okay, Mo decided.
Boyfriend
was simplifying things, but it was okay.

The thing about seeing her again, first time after sleeping together, a day later, you've built it up in your mind, your hopes, but you're not sure she's in the same place as you are. Leaving her apartment Friday morning after coffee and kisses, there'd been a lot of smiles. But that was kind of morning-after obligatory, didn't necessarily signify reciprocal feelings.

So now you say hello, and you go in and your heart is pounding because being near her is a thrill, and because you're scared to death she's feeling differently. And there's an awkwardness, she's being formal or cautious or something. And you want to respect that, so you're cautious, too, courteous, hesitant. Trying to respect her needs and wishes, not assume too much or take anything for granted.

For a few minutes you're sure the whole thing has gone down the tubes, you're both watching each other with that high alertness and reserve, and then by accident you bump shoulders and something breaks, the wall falls down. Suddenly you're in each other's arms, full contact. It's the best feeling there could be, coming through the wall, better than the first time because now you know it means something. And it's such a relief for both of you, you can't stop, you just give in and the clothes have to come off and you're in bed and you're
verifying
everything as ifyou were both afraid it had just been a dream, this is
real,
and there's nothing held back at all.

Some time later, she leaned over him, hair tented around his face, and said, "Hi."

"Hi." They chuckled for no real reason. After another minute, he said, "Listen, you've got to help me get up. I mean it. If I lie here for another minute, I'll pass out."

She heard the seriousness in his voice,
time to get to business,
and reluctantly prodded him out of bed. Once he was upright, she pushed him into the bathroom and started the shower for him. When he came out, she was waiting with a mug of fresh coffee. He drank it scalding hot, using the burn to help wake up.

They got dressed and sat in the living room as he brought her up to date: Byron Bushnell and the scene at Dennis Radcliffs house last night, his belief that Geppetto had reacquired Radcliff.

"It was inevitable," she said. "As a test subject, Pinocchio was falling apart. Geppetto is highly organized, he's got an agenda that shapes his actions just as much as his compulsions do. Radcliff was making too many mistakes. Exposing Geppetto in too many ways."

"Question is, what does he do with Radcliff now?"

"Most likely attempts to refresh his conditioning—reprograms him. Geppetto would be disinclined to waste the time and energy he's invested in him."

"So what's the new program? Just more random kills?"

She didn't answer, but her face told him: No, no more random kills. That wasn't working with Radcliff. Geppetto would use Radcliff strategically, target him to protect his agenda. As he had sent Parker after Rebecca.

"So the question is, who'll be the target?" he asked.

"Does Geppetto have any way of knowing . . . you and I are onto him?" The thought brought fear into her face: She knew too well how it felt to be targeted.

Mo had pondered that, trying to let reason prevail, to get Mudda Raymon's voice out of his head:
De puppet-puppet gon' come after you.

"I don't think so. No more than any other principals in the case—Biedermann, or some of his people, or even Mike St. Pierre, or . . ." He petered out, remembering the other development in his thinking of the last twenty-four hours.

"What just happened? Tell me, Mo." Seeing it in his face.

So he told her about meeting Biedermann at the bar, the handcuffs implicating Ty. Then about Flannery, his suggestive background, the way he was manipulating Mo, the way he seemed to know everything Mo did, keeping tabs on him. The right physical type, a number of matches to the emerging psychological profile of Geppetto. The way he'd steered Mo's suspicion to Biedermann. Rebecca listened carefully, no longer so skeptical of Mo's hunches.

"But you're not buying Biedermann's suspicions about Ty."

"I can't see it. I just. . . can't."
Can't or won't?
he asked himself. He wished he felt as certain as his words implied. "Especially not when Flannery is starting to look so likely. I know the material I have on him is completely circumstantial. But I've got a few lines of inquiry out, I should know more in a few days."

"I think you should tell Erik. At least ask him if he's ever considered Flannery."

Mo tipped his head, ambivalent.

"We either trust him or we don't, Mo! Which is it?"

"Not that simple. The more we know about this, the more Biedermann and his 'cleanup crew' have to worry about us.. I trust Biedermann to fulfill his brief. I just don't know how far his brief goes."

She didn't agree. They argued about it for a time, ending with a decision to wait a little longer on talking to Biedermann about Flannery.

Then it was her turn. "Let me catch you up on what I've been doing. First, I've been building the profile of Geppetto. The tapes of Ronald Parker's talking to himself in his cell have been a big help. As you heard, he has two primary affective modes, two main 'voices' in his speech. One is rambling, disorganized, dissociated. The other is the lecturing voice, the rote statements and slogans, which I see as an artifact of a conditioning process. From that content I can draw a bead on Geppetto's agenda."

"Which is—?"

Rebecca went to her desk, found a sheaf of notes, flipped through the pages. "I think Geppetto sees himself as a warrior, a guerrilla. His puppet-making is part of a mission that he feels is morally defensible. His actions are statements, almost acts
of protest.
He casts himself and his puppets and their victims as martyrs to a higher cause, because society doesn't acknowledge him. He feels persecuted and outcast."

"That part's pretty typical, with serial killers."

"True. But in his case, the delusion seems to have an unusually powerful internal consistency."

"So what's his statement? What's he protesting?"

She shrugged, and her brows made graceful question marks.

"Don't know. Something as simple as his own childhood trauma? Something as complex as some social or political injustice, real or perceived? Whichever, we know it centers on control." For a moment she looked defeated by the mystery, but then she rallied. "I need to go over the tapes again and do some more reading in the medical literature.
But,"
she went on, "I also got a lot from Parker's other voice—his ramblings. I performed a quantitative analysis."

"What's that?"

"In one sense, it's a crude tool, but it can often be very helpful. Basically, you inventory what the patient says when he free-associates. The basic idea is simply that themes that show up frequently are probably significant."

"So what themes cropped up?"

" 'Daddy' is a big one, we saw that right away. In fact, records show Parker was physically abused—violent, not sexual—by his father, but in this case I doubt the daddy theme is directly left over from childhood trauma at his father's hands. I think Geppetto deliberately acted the daddy role, exploited it, to anchor Parker's programming in his childhood. Tie in to archetypes of fear and authority residual from infancy. It's smart conditioning."

"Does that mean Geppetto knew something about Parker's past—knew he'd been abused?"

"If he did, it would suggest that he either knew Parker personally or did background research as part of his procurement process. Parker has a record with social welfare agencies, the juvenile-detention and foster-care systems—Geppetto could have found that out, chosen him on the basis of his past. But not necessarily. Unfortunately, daddies are all too often . . . frightening, authoritarian, controlling figures. Geppetto could just be exploiting that generality."

Mo thought about that, took out his pad and noted it. That was good: Geppetto's procurement techniques could leave a trail back to him. "What else?"

"Let's see. Well, there were a couple of odd ones. 'Dogs' came up a lot. 'Like the dogs.' 'Where the dogs go when they're bad.' Not sure what to make of that . . . Then there's 'the junkyard,' or 'the dump.' It's connected with both punishment and reward. Comes up again and again."

A chill shimmied up Mo's spine. Mudda Raymon said something about a "dump-yard." "Is the junkyard a . . . a real place? Or a symbolic place?"

She did an admiring double take. "God, I love the way you catch these things! I'm not sure. Symbolically, it sounds threatening—a dump is ugly, a place where broken or unneeded things are discarded. If Parker was a 'thing,' maybe 'Daddy' threatened to throw him away if he didn't behave? But I got the sense it might be a real environment. 'Don't make me go to the dump.' 'Daddy loves me, I did good in the junkyard.'"

"So it could be a real place."

"Sure. But not necessarily a real junkyard. Could be a real place that Geppetto gave a symbolically meaningful name. But I have a theory." This was dark stuff, but Rebecca was looking pleased with herself. The bloodhound look. Mo shook his head, amazed at her.

She was getting into it now, pacing and gesturing as she explained, "I thought about how you would conduct conditioning on human beings. Geppetto required about twenty months for each subject, right? We figured that from the time elapsed between when Ronald Parker went missing and his first kill, and it strikes me as about right for the minimum time needed to establish solid conditioning. Okay. You'd have to have a private, secure place, to do this stuff. It would be someplace where you could come and go without attracting anyone's attention—maybe a rural location. It'd have to be a place where people couldn't see or hear anything, so it'd be inside, maybe a basement or attic. But if you wanted to create killers who could stay stable in the real world, keep a semblance of normalcy as they went about the killing, you couldn't just turn them loose afterward. Not after twenty months in some dark hole, probably strung up like a puppet a lot of the time. They'd be severely agoraphobic when they first got outside again—cripplingly afraid of open spaces. They might not be in good physical shape. You'd have to acclimate them to the outdoors again by degrees, and you'd want them to get strong. Most important, you'd want to exercise the programming in situations where the subject wasn't under direct physical control. Geppetto would have to be sure his subjects could experience physical freedom and yet still obey commands and implanted compulsions. Parker's remarks are very fragmentary, but I think the dump is where Geppetto took him when he was almost ready to be set loose. The final stage of conditioning. Very strenuous, very scary, yet liberating, too. The site of the most extreme punishments and most extreme rewards."