Puppets (37 page)

46

W
EDNESDAY NIGHT, Mo called Rebecca and asked if she might want a late visitor. She said she wouldn't mind, so he took a long shower and at nine-thirty locked Carla's mom's house and drove into Manhattan. It seemed like forever since they'd been alone with each other. The scene Tuesday when she'd surprised him on the front steps didn't count, they'd both been off-balance. He wanted to be in a nice room with her, in a bed with her.

Also, Gus had called back. They had things to discuss.

He had spent the day on the junkyard circuit. In all, he and St. Pierre and the others had now toured twenty-seven of thirty-eight priority sites. Tomorrow they'd finish up and call this a dead end. Probably Parker's "junkyard" was something else entirely. The failure of the initiative made Rebecca's work all the more important, especially with what he'd learned from Gus.

Midweek Manhattan at ten-thirty at night. Rebecca in her bathrobe, hair still moist from her shower. You come in and you are literally shaking with longing, you try to pretend you've got any self-control but you don't and she sees it. You can't talk right, you stumble against the arm of the couch, the nearness of her is too much. There's bad business to discuss, you're feeling soiled by this job, but there's no point, you both know it.
Priorities,
she always says, got to keep your priorities. So you come together urgently, desperately, as if good moments like this have to be stolen, fast. Before it's too late.

It was midnight before they got down to business. Mo wrapped himself in one of the sheets, she put on her robe again and made a pot of chamomile tea. They got out their notebooks and pens.

"I've learned a few things about Flannery," Mo told her. "First, my . . . source . . . tells me the hospital he worked at in Georgia didn't just deal with wounded and traumatized veterans. It was apparently one of the sites of the MKULTBJV experiments, where they did some of the LSD experiments."

Her face showed that this kind of thing grieved Rebecca deeply: the abuse of the sciences of healing. "Was Flannery directly involved?"

"Hard to say. He was there at the time, it's hard to believe he didn't participate or at least know about it. Flannery told me he'd worked there, it's no secret. But according to my source, he understated the amount of time he spent in Vietnam. In fact, he shuttled back and forth pretty frequently for about five years."

"Lab work in the States, fieldwork over there?"

"Could be." Mo looked at his notes, remembering Gus's voice, the acid tinge coming into his monotone as he'd talked about Flannery. Like most former street cops, Gus hated the prosecutors, who too often blew the collars handed them on silver platters by honest cops, losing cases or copping pleas. He hated Flannery's grandstanding, glad-handing style and had been glad to give Mo some dirt.

"The other important info I got concerns his distant past. Flannery did have personal experience of the social-services system as a juvenile. Turns out that's no secret, either. I've got copies of articles about him in which he talks nobly about his own early misfortunes, how his own victimization as a child moved him to go into first medicine and then law, very high-minded of him. Beaten by an alcoholic father, in and out of foster homes from the time he was eight years old. Apparently he had the bad luck to get into an abusive foster home, too. Again, it was the father, the foster father, who beat him. His case made the newspapers back in 1953, caused a lot of public agonizing about the foster care system."

Rebecca was staring into the distance, processing the news. This hurt her, too, Mo saw. After a while she said quietly, "It's funny. So easy to have compassion for a child victim. So hard to have sympathy for an adult who's 'strange' or 'remote' or 'an asshole.' And yet they're the same person! The adult survivor of abuse is just as much the victim." She stared through the wall for another moment, then went on: "Okay. The previous abuse, especially at the hands of a 'daddy,' matches our profile. Did you get any specifics about the form of the abuse?"

"You mean, did it involve bondage, confinement, that stuff? I don't know." Mo made a note to look for those details.

Rebecca was thinking furiously. "Could our junkyard be a place from his past? Maybe he was taken to a dump or junkyard and tormented there?"

Mo shrugged, made another note.

"Also, what about the physical appearance of the abusive fathers?"

"Right—are they by any chance blond, blue-eyed? Don't know." Mo jotted the question. Rebecca was a hot ticket, no question.

Rebecca went on for a while, thinking out loud. She had the mind of a sleuth, thinking of angles, playing them out in her head.

But Mo found himself shifting gears. At this point Ty seemed out of the question, Flannery was looking too good. But how could you catch a guy like Flannery? Positioned at the top of the law-enforcement food chain, cultivating relationships everywhere, Flannery had eyes and ears in every department, every county office. Good connections throughout the New York metropolitan area. Since he was considered a guy who was going places, people liked doing him favors in expectation of some future reward, and outside the DA's office itself Flannery was well liked. The arrangement made it hard to poke into his life without someone noticing and reporting back to him. Gus: For all his uncanny talents, there were basic things he couldn't know, facts that weren't recorded in some file or computer somewhere.

Such as where Flannery went at night after work.

That's where some old-fashioned legwork would do the trick, Mo thought. He looked at Rebecca as she wrote something down and decided that for now he'd avoid mentioning the idea to her.

As Mo had expected, the junkyard idea pooped out. By midday Thursday, St. Pierre and the others had reported in. No employees had recognized the photos of Parker or Radcliff. As far as physical evidence went, dumps were messy places, and short of finding eyelets set into some wall in a star-shaped pattern, it was impossible to tell whether any of the sites had been used as training grounds for killer puppets.

Disappointing, but expected. Long shot. Mo had plenty of other things to do. At four o'clock, he called Flannery on his personal cell phone with the excuse of wanting to report in. He got the DA on the line briefly, related a few details about Radcliff. As soon as he hung up, he left the barracks, got into his car, drove downtown. He parked in a spot with a good view of the county building parking lot and the entrance. At four-thirty, county employees flooded the exit, swarming toward their cars. Mo scanned the crowd with binoculars, watching for Flannery's unmistakable bald dome above the other heads. No sign of him. But that was okay, too: As the cars in the lot thinned out, he spotted the DA's silver-gray BMW. It had been easy to get the DA's registration information from the DMV earlier.

Five-thirty and the BMW was still there in an increasingly empty parking lot. Mo began to feel exposed, sitting here on the street. He started the car, pulled into traffic, took one turn around the block, then another, wondering if maybe Flannery just left the Beemer there for show and used other transportation when he went to his lab or wherever.

But on the third circuit, he came along Martin Luther King Drive to see the big man leaving the building, attended by a couple of suits. The three of them paused on the sidewalk to discuss something. Flannery gave orders, and then they went separate ways. Flannery went on alone, briefcase in hand, the picture of a hurried, harried guy: long strides, tie loosened and jacket unbuttoned, scowling as he went through his keys.

Then Flannery dipped into the BMW, started up, left the lot. Mo held back to let some other cars get in between, then followed the silver car through the city.

For a while Flannery drove through the business district on Mamaroneck, then he pulled over. Mo shrank down in his seat as he drove past, then watched in the rearview as Flannery got out, crossed the sidewalk, and went into a hardware store.

Mo drove up another couple of blocks, pulled a U, drove past the store again. Two blocks farther down, he turned again and pulled over. After a few minutes, Flannery came out with a paper bag that he tossed into the passenger seat before getting in again. Mo experienced a sudden hankering for the contents of that bag. Light-bulbs? Or supplies for his puppet-making hobby?

The BMW pulled out and after a decent interval Mo followed. Flannery was a skillful driver, running just at the speed limit when traffic allowed, his turn signals coming on just before his turns. If it came to Flannery taking evasive maneuvers, Mo knew his Chevy Lumina would never keep up with the agile BMW. But Flannery seemed oblivious—wherever he was going, he wasn't worried about being followed. A turn, another, then onto a residential street. Mo followed for another couple of blocks before realizing with a shock that this was his own neighborhood. And then the DA turned onto the block where Carla's mom's house was.

Mo paused at the end of the tree-shaded block. Six o'clock,

sun still well above the horizon, nice neighborhood, a few kids on the lawns. Flannery pulled his BMW into Mo's driveway. He got out, stood looking around the yard for a moment, then sat back against the hood and squinted up at the empty windows of the big house.

Okay,
Mo was thinking.
Let's see what you've got in mind.
He pulled up to the curb in front of the house and got out.

"What a surprise," Mo said.

"Nice place you've got here," Flannery said. "Guy almost has to wonder how you can afford a place like this on a detective's salary."

"Looking for something else to charge me with?"

Flannery just frowned at him. "Listen, you got anything cold to drink? It's hot out here."

"Sorry. Nothing. If I'd known I was having visitors, I'd have picked something up."

Flannery took a handkerchief out of his jacket pocket, dabbed his bald head. "Okay, good, we got the pleasantries out of the way. So let's get to business. Why I'm here."

Mo approached the BMW. He could see the bag on the seat, Ace Hardware logo, the bulge that could be just about anything. Then the thought occurred to him: Flannery's wrists. If Rebecca was right, Geppetto might also have scarring on his wrists, bondage might have been part of Flannery's abuse as a child. Thinking back, Mo realized he'd never seen him without his suit jacket on, except on his treadmill or in the racquetball court. And both those times he'd been wearing wide, sweat-absorbent terry wristbands. But Flannery had already put away the handkerchief, put his hands in his pockets so the jacket sleeve covered his wrists.

"I'm here," Flannery went on, "because I wanted a very private conversation with you. Because I need you to do something, you have a visceral, instinctive resistance to doing."

"Which is?"

"To trust me." Flannery's eyes were a little wry but very alert as he said it. "To try to help me out."

"Right. Good. Of course."

A little flash of anger, quickly quelled. "Here's the deal. You and I both know what the rules are—what we can and cannot do within the legal constraints of our positions. But the difference between us is, you don't give much of a shit about working within those constraints. You have a well-deserved rep as an independent thinker, a free operative. And at your level, you can just about get away with it. Me, it's a different story. Oh, I can throw my weight around, I can trade favors. But the spotlight's always on me. And I have a career here, I can't jeopardize it with"—Flannery groped for the right euphemism—"marginally acceptable procedure."

"You want me to do something
illegal?
When you're trying to fuck me over? Are you
kidding?"

"Not illegal, just problematical for me. It has to do with your friend and mine, Erik Biedermann."

"So go for him. You don't need me."

"Sure I do. If Biedermann has any personal connection to this puppet business, it's a big problem. Because he's a highly placed federal agent. Because he has connections with covert intelligence-community operations. Because accusing him, rightly or wrongly, can create big problems for the person doing it."

Mo was thinking,
Tell me about it.
He wanted desperately to see what was in the bag. Flannery's wrists, too. But the DA was still wearing his suit jacket, and now he crossed his arms so that his wrists were out of view. His biceps bulged the fabric of the suit. Definitely one big, fit guy.