Puppets (4 page)

5

S
T. PIERRE HELPED WITH the first neighborhood canvass, then got a ride back to the barracks with one of the uniforms. Mo got out of there at eighto'clock, after sundown, one of the last to leave. The neighborhood's nine-to-fivers were home again, the cars were back at the curbs and in the driveways, it was a beautiful Friday night in mid-May and the air was sweet with the smell of tree blossoms. But the lawns and sidewalks were deserted. Lights were burning in all the houses, but the curtains were drawn and Mo knew the doors were locked. The streetlights had come on and insects spun in the cones of light, the occasional bat zapping through to feed. Something about the mild humidity, the cooling air, reminded Mo of when he was a kid, the evenings after school as summer approached, the excitement of just being loose in the streets, gliding on your bike through the spring air. He wondered how long it would be before the kids here would feel good about being outside again.

For an instant he thought yearningly about going home, back to the house and the unlikely but possible comforts of Carla's arms, maybe even the cleansing heat and abandon of making love to her, they'd slipped a couple of times since agreeing to sleep apart. And then his body remembered the awful embrace of O'Connor's corpse as the last strand was cut and its weight fell onto him as he and Angelo wrestled the rubbery, clutching thing onto the gurney. Maybe he'd need to get a little distance on that before holding Carla, or anybody, again.

He lifted the crime-scene tape, got into his car, started the drive back toward the barracks, thinking,
Maybe this really isn't the job for me.

When he'd first moved up to investigator at Major Crimes, despite knowing several MCU cops and having seen some bad stuff, he hadn't been ready for what it did to you. The stresses and strains, the opposing forces. The movies had it wrong, it wasn't about car chases and shoot-outs and sexy encounters. Ninety-five percent of the job was sheer tedium—depositions, triplicate paperwork, reviewing regulations, debriefings, reading files, hassling with schedules, go-nowhere interviews, conferences, waiting on bottlenecks at the lab or some other department. The other five percent? Sheer horror. Going into somebody's kitchen and slipping on half-coagulated blood, the smell that doesn't come off your clothes, the contorted face you can't forget. Poking around in some guts or brains or jism or vomit or shit. All the Major Crimes people knew about it: the female victim who looked kind of like your wife, the boy who looked like your own kid, the way you could never, look at your own family or friends again the same way.

And the only break from this was the remaining one tenth of one percent of the job, which was the dubious pleasure of chasing down and having it out with a killer.

All this for forty-five K a year.

So why do it?

Mo had pondered that a lot lately. Most of the other Major Crimes types he knew were motivated by a sincere desire to serve, a lot like armed services people, which many of them had been. They wanted to combat evil, maybe they had religious beliefs that kept them going and more or less in one piece. Few of them would admit it outright, because it didn't seem hip or flashy enough. But despite the popular image, these were not hip or flashy people. Most were thoughtful, worried people who had originally, at least, felt the pain of victims and survivors acutely and had sworn something like a private blood oath to avenge their suffering. Even the hotshots who were in it for guns and glamour—they usually adopted the jaded pose because it was easier than admitting that what they saw and did got to them.

Even Valsangiacomo, a real cowboy. Once Mo had run into him down at The Edge. He'd joined him at the bar and watched him toss back shots of Jack Daniel's for a while, then asked him what was with the rapid intake of whiskey. Valsangiacomo, six-one and a bodybuilder, let his shoulders slump. "This morning, Helena and I, we're about to make love, but the baby comes in the bedroom. So we knock off and take a rain check for tonight, right?" Helena was a gorgeous, dark-haired, full-breasted woman Valsangiacomo had met while visiting relatives back in Napoli, had courted madly and brought back to the U.S. Mo could easily imagine how much you'd look forward to that rain check. "So then today Estey and I get called to a scene upin Bedford. Woman, naked on the bedroom floor, great body, I'm thinking, What a waste. She's been cut all over, bled out, circumstances indicate rape, too, so we have to check for semen. We're exploring her orifices, natural and man-made, with Popsicle sticks and swabs and flashlights. Kneeling in the blood? And now Helena, she's at home, expecting me back, got all kinds of great plans. And I know I'm not gonna be able to do anything tonight, but I don't want to tell her why? Trying not to bring the stuff home, but what're you supposed to say?"

There wasn't really an answer for this problem, so you stopped off at The Edge and poured them down.

Some people were constituted to take it better than others. They shook off the images of the day. They took each case as it came and didn't think in terms of combating all the world's evils. Carla had been on Mo for years to see it like that, but maybe if you had certain kinds of sensitivities, or the habit of looking for the big picture, you couldn't see all the crimes and hurts except in some kind of cumulative way. And the burden had been adding up, Mo felt as if every day on the job eroded his sense of human worth and goodness a little further. How far could you let that go before you bought a big bottle of Thunder bird and lay down in the gutter and gave up on it all?

But what would he do instead? He could get books and read about the color of his parachute or how to define his midlife crisis or whatever it was when you changed careers later in life. He could pay an arm and a leg to some career counselor to give him skills and affinities tests and tell him that he should have been a brain surgeon or a park service ranger or something. More likely, take a big pay cut and start a career microwaving frozen beef patties at a burger place.

Mo braked the car in the left lane as he waited for a trio of bicyclists to pedal past the entrance to the barracks parking lot. Thinking about all this had made him irritable and sad, and he waited impatiently for the bikers to slide past, peddling with tiny red lights flickering madly on their bike frames. There were two men and a woman, sleek as plastic greyhounds in skintight spandex in black with rainbow neon stripes, walnut-shaped helmets with tiny spiffy rearview mirrors clipped to their temples, special gloves and shoes. The three of them all seemed to have the same build, slim and long-limbed with standout sinews, as if they were a distinct species, bionic aliens from some streamlined planet.
What's this, the fucking Tour de France?
Mo groused.
Can't even go for a bike ride without three grand worth of clothes
and equipment. Something the matter with a T-shirt and shorts?
He couldn't remember the last time he'd seen an adult bicyclist wearing anything but high-tech,Euro-styled outfits, and suddenly the whole trend seemed symbolic of the decline of Western civilization, the universal collapse of values.

Then the last of them cleared the entrance, and he pulled into the lot. He found his space and shut off the car and spent a moment looking up at the bright windows of the barracks building, fifty feet away. People were moving inside, silhouettes in the windows, somebody showing papers to somebody else, talking about it, moving on. Cops came and went under the lighted portico at the entrance, purposeful and competent-looking.

Looking out at it, he suddenly understood Marsden's inexplicable intimacy, what was really troubling him. Marsden was mother-henning, he really loved his squad and was worried about how it would hold up if he wasn't there to oversee it. Marsden didn't always get along with his wife, and he'd never had any children. But everybody had some nesting instinct, and for Marsden the shop had become his home, Mo and Valsangiacomo and the others were his kids. It was kind of touching. Marsden had been there so long he saw this as something precious and worth working for. For a moment Mo glimpsed the place as Marsden must have seen it. Something about the senpe of quiet industry here, even this late at night. Confidence and camaraderie. Professionalism, teamwork. A little citadel of comparative order, a bulwark against the world's craziness.

For no reason a tall, Mo suddenly felt better, the problem of
why
more distant.
A Howdy Doody copycat,
he thought,
maybe it could be
interesting.
He got out of the car and headed toward the brightly lit building, beginning to like the idea of looking into the files and getting a handle on this thing. Anyway, he was in no shape to deal with Carla right now.

6

M
ONDAY MORNING AFTER ONE of the worst weekends in recent memory. Feeling driven from the house and the problems of domestic life, or rather the lack thereof, Mo sought the refuge of preoccupation and got to the shop bright and early. He put in a call to SAC Biedermann at the Manhattan FBI field office, and as he waited for a call back he reviewed the Howdy Doody files he'd pulled off VICAP on Friday night. He'd been at his desk less than an hour when his phone rang and he took a call from someone who introduced himself as Roland Van Voorden, chief of police of the town of Buchanan. Marsden had patched him through.

"What can I do for you, Chief Van Voorden?" Mo asked.

"We have a body, a homicide. Some kids found the corpse late yesterday afternoon in the old power station here."

"Okay . . ." Mo said, putting a question in his voice and wondering why Marsden had sent this one to him.

Van Voorden answered his thoughts. "Your SI said it might tie in with a case you're working on. That's kind of a pun—whoever did it tied the body up? Like to the wall, with fish line, lots of lines tied to eyelets in the wall?"

Holy shit,
Mo thought.
O'Connor was killed just three days ago, if this
guy's killed another already, he's on areal tear.

Mo got the location from Van Voorden, instructed him on securing the crime scene, made calls for technical assistance. Then he signed out and drove to Buchanan, twenty miles northwest of White Plains on the banks of the Hudson Paver.

He took 287 west, then cut north on Sprain Brook Parkway. The motions of driving were soothing, permitting some good thinking. The proverbial clarity that comes from the open road, he thought. But then, turning onto 9A, he came up behind a big beige Land Rover that he couldn't pass or see around or over, and he lost that fantasy quick. The roads were choked with traffic.

Still. Friday night he'd called Angelo, who had just finished packing O'Connor's twisted corpse away for the weekend. Angelo had anticipated his request for an expedited autopsy but told him there was no way, even bumping back a couple of other customers, that he could get to it before Tuesday. Then Mo had gotten the FBI's Manhattan field office on the phone, where the twenty-four-hour operator told him there was no way to reach Biedermann before Monday. He'd downloaded some files on Howdy Doody from the FBI VICAP site and had a good read for a few hours until his eyes began to water and he went home to the big house and Carla. It was almost midnight.

She was on the couch, reading by the light of the goosenecked lamp, the only light burning in the whole echoing place. She had put on music, a big Mahler symphony that seemed incongruous played that quiet. When he walked in he was glad to see her still up, looking lovely and shadowed in her exotic pajamas.

He said, "Hi," she said,"Hi," and she put down her book. He started toward her to give her a kiss, then thought better of it. His clothes might have a smell on them from bear-hugging O'Connor's corpse, and anyway she didn't look as if she wanted a kiss. Instead he went into the kitchen for something to eat.

"I made some soup, just heat itup," she called in.

That sounded good. Without turning on the kitchen light, he washed his hands, then lit the gas beneath the pot and took a bowl from the cabinet. He got a beer from the refrigerator, popped it, went out to the living room. He stripped off his jacket and shirt, down to the T-shirt, so he could feel better about being near her. "How's it going?" he said. She said, "Fine." The kind of openings people fell back on when they felt the pressure of more important things to say but couldn't get there yet. "Don't ask me about my day," he said, a code they'd worked out for saying it had been gruesome. Of course, what'd it leave to talk about?

The symphony went into a brooding minor-key movement, and Carla looked unbearably lovely as she told him she would be moving out. She'd get a place with her friend Stephanie in Mount Vernon, which might be better anyway because it was closer to her client base. There was no hurry for Mo to find another place, Mom liked him, probably if he did ever get around to the painting and stuff, he could stay on here as long as he liked.

She had obviously planned what she was going to say because it came out smoothly, well-reasoned, logical. In fact, it was surprising how many of the details she had worked out, how far it had gone in her mind while he'd still been thinking the relationship was worth trying to salvage. He said that to her, sitting on the coffee table dangling the beer can between his knees, and she reached over to put a warm hand on his cheek and said,"I think we both would like a relationship that's not about'salvaging' something." And the way she said it hurt him, as if it were about rescuing junk and recycling it maybe. But she was also right, that was almost as bad, he'd suddenly seen himself as hanging on to
a
relationship rather than
this
relationship. Suddenly he saw that in the three years they'd spent together it had never really felt right, despite some real tenderness and some good sex, there'd always been that disconnect, that sense of coming from behind. Of, yes, salvaging something.

The soup had burned. They'd slept apart, again, and he'd spent the weekend helping her organize her things for the move.

The traffic clotted up again near Briarcliff Manor, and he came out of his thoughts to barely avoid slamming into the rear end of another damned Land Rover. In fact, there was an identical one behind him, a Toyota version, and when he looked down the road, it seemed that every vehicle was some kind of heavy-duty safari truck, with massive, knobby tires and tube-steel grilles and huge luggage racks rearing on the high, square roofs. Big gunboats built for the deep outback, for driving on the thorny, hard soil of African savannas, with plate-steel running boards and spare tires bolted to the back gates. Massive as military vehicles, and getting ten miles per gallon, and all of them driven over the smooth roads of Westchester by anorexic housewives on their way to their manicurists, aerobics classes, orthodontists.
What's happening to us?
he thought with alarm. For a minute he fumed at the vagaries of fashion, mankind's lemming instincts, then decided the hell with it. He put his flasher on the dashboard, lit it up, and carved a path for himself through the intersection.

Van Voorden had given him good directions to the old power station, into Buchanan and then over toward the river and south past the Indian Point nuke plants. He passed the red-and-white tower and rounded domes, continued along the heavily wooded shore, and came up to a white, flash bar-topped Chevy Suburban that was parked across from a dusty little church. The Buchanan cop showed him to a dirt access road, and he rolled slowly down the bluff through a mishmash of trees, vines, broken masonry, abandoned gravel pits, trash. At first he worried about his oil pan, but then the land smoothed out and the trees opened to a big view of the Hudson River.

The old station loomed at the water's edge, a massive brick cube about four stories tall. It had the tall, round-topped windows and decorative masonry of the last century, but now the windows were covered with corrugated sheet steel. Originally it had been surrounded by many smaller outbuildings, but in the years since it had been decommissioned these had fallen into heaps of rubble grown over with weeds and vines. The road ended in a dusty parking area near the rearing wall, and Mo pulled up next to a pair of Buchanan cruisers.

The shore of the Hudson here was a kind of no-man's-land, with the power-company property theoretically off-limits to the public but widely used by hikers and teenagers who enjoyed the views and rocky outcroppings. When Mo had been in high school in New Rochelle, he'd sometimes come over this way with friends. They'd bring beer and start campfires and get drunk and make out, looking across miles of slate-blue water, the rolling headlands, tugboats nudging barges upstream, the sparkling lights of the far shore. Twenty years later, the ground was littered with beer cans, Styrofoam cups, fast-food junk, used condoms, blown newspapers and plastic garbage bags caught in bushes, all mixed with industrial rubble left over from the power station's early days: old machine parts, broken concrete walls, railroad ties rotting in haphazard stacks. Hiking paths had been beaten into the grass and sumac brush, meandering along the river. Just to the north, gigantic steel gantries reared on either side of the river, holding sagging power cables from the nuke plant.

Mo followed a path close to the wall of the building, wondering where Van Voorden, or the victim and murderer, had gotten inside. Around on the water side, he found a crumbling flight of broad concrete steps leading to an outlandishly huge, ceremonial doorway. New York, the Empire State. The doors were covered with graffiti-decorated sheet steel, but one corner of the rusted metal had been pried away to make a triangular opening about three feet tall, big enough to crawl through. He was just crouching down to go inside when a man in a brown police uniform came around the far corner.

"Oh," the guy said."Detective Ford? I was waiting for you, but then I thought I'd look around a bit. I'm Van Voorden."

"Got held up by traffic," Mo told him. The parade of Land Rovers.

They shook hands. Van Voorden was tall, bony, with a long neck and a protuberant Adam's apple of such size and angularity that Mo became uncomfortably conscious of his own, bobbing in his throat.

"We don't get much of this here," Van Voorden said."This is my first, my first, uh-—" He petered out, not sure what to call it.

"Let's take a look," Mo suggested.

They crawled through the opening and into an entry foyer that was lit only by thin lines of sunlight squeezing around the edges of the sheet steel over the doors and windows. The room had tiled walls, and the air was humid, earthy, smelling of rot and piss. The mash of litter continued inside, and ferns grew in cracks in the floor.

Van Voorden switched on a big four-battery light and panned it around the vault.

"Basically," he said, "this thing is just one big room, except for in front here there's this entry and a pair of offices or something on each side. We got to go through there"—shining his light on a doorway opposite the front doors—"into the main room, down some stairs, and back under where we are now. I've got some people down there now."

"Is this the only way inside?" Mo asked. He had brought his own flash and lit it up also.

"I think so. The kids that found the body came in and out this way, so that's how we made entry."

Van Voorden led the way into the main chamber. It was, as he said, a single huge room that had once housed the massive boilers and turbines but that was now stripped and mostly empty from floor to ceiling. The room rose straight to the rafters high overhead, cavernous and obscure, lit only by slit gaps in the sheet metal. Swallows swooped to nests in the rafters.

They went down a flight of stairs to aground floor of buckled concrete and dirt with scraggy bushes growing through, litter everywhere, little circles of wood ash and charcoal where trespassers had made campfires. Mo felt it before he consciously saw it, the subliminally registering ordering of things: a circle of beer cans around a star shape of overlaid boards, zigzags of loose bricks with cigarette butts set into the angles. At the bottom of the stairs, Van Voorden steered him toward the front of the building again, where the lower level was divided into several rooms. Mo heard the mutter of voices and saw other flashlights panning in one of the rooms, and then as they got closer, he smelled the corpse. Despite his reluctance to breathe deeply, he felt a gust of relief blow through him: Not a fresh corpse, the new guy wasn't on a rampage of a kill every other day. This one had to be much older. Maybe even a victim left over from the original Howdy Doody killer, who'd been apprehended, what, four months ago.

The death room was a concrete and brick chamber the size of an average living room, lit by flashlights and by slits of daylight around a tiny, steel-covered window up near the ceiling. Van Voorden introduced him to the Buchanan officers, a woman and two men. They all held handkerchiefs over their faces. A glance showed Mo that they'd done a great job of overlaying the dirt floor with prints of cop-uniforms hoes.

Then Van Voorden introduced him to the corpse, and the others obligingly coordinated their flashlights on the wall. Older, yes. In fact, the body had come apart and only portions remained strung to the wall: two forearms and hands with clutching skeletal fingers, an inverted head held in place by polyline around a segment of bare spinal column. The rest had rotted or been eaten by rodents until it couldn't support its own weight, and the torso had fallen away onto the rubbled floor. One desiccated leg was still in place, lines taut from the mummified knee and ankle to the eyelets sunk into the concrete, but the other had fallen. The bulk of the body was a tangled mound on the floor, overlaid by a cloud of delicate white mold. Mo panned his light away from it and around the room, seeing again the telltale organization of objects in the rubble. Holding his breath and leaning close to the inverted head—from the long, golden hair hanging down, he guessed this one had been a woman—he used a tongue depressor to probe in the desiccated jerky just above where the ear would've been. There it was, a little circular pit going down to the bone, another signature wound of the Howdy Doody killer or his copier. No sign of the nylon handcuffs, but he looked closely at the cords, and, yes, it was weed-whacker line, ribbed with sharp edges. Not fish line.