Puppets (5 page)

"Like I said, this is the first one of, uh, these I've ever dealt with,"Van Voorden said. His voice was muffled by the handkerchief he held over his mouth and nose.

"Who found her?" Mo asked.

"Kids. A couple of boys from town, thirteen- or fourteen-year-olds, I know the one of them's folks. They were out here Sunday, goofing around, dared each other to come back under here. They came in, saw this, then left in a big hurry. I didn't hear about it until this morning. The boys bicycled home and weren't sure whether to tell anyone, they were afraid they'd get in trouble for trespassing in here. But they both ended up telling their parents, and they called me."

The corpse was so decayed that from medical evidence alone it would be hard to tell when the murder had occurred. There'd be rot, mold, animal and insect damage. No finger skin remaining for prints, but Mo saw a half-circle of teeth down in the tangle, and dental records might help them get a name. Once they'd identified the victim, they could talk to friends or family and pin down when she'd last been seen. He hoped it would turn out to be five months ago, and then he could give this one to the Howdy Doody prosecutors.

"How often do you think people come inside here?" Mo asked.

Van Voorden shrugged. "My guess is not that often. Not till school's out, another few weeks. Probably people come inside the building almost every weekend, but I'll bet not many come back under here, too creepy and dark. I know I sure as hell wouldn't."

It sounded like a fair assessment to Mo. His guess was that the corpse was at least a month old, but it could as easily have been here six months or more, especially if the murder had happened during winter. There'd be fat damage but the cold would've kept insects and bacterial rot down until the warmer weather set in.

"Okay," he said, making a decision. "I'm going to ask you all to follow each other single file out of the building the way you came in. Then I'd like you to start taking the metal down off the front doors so the Crime Scene people and the ME can get their equipment through. Avoid handling the area where the gap is, we'll look for hairs and fibers on the surfaces there. Also, if I can ask one of you to wait in the parking area for the others and direct them back here when they come, I'd appreciate it."

They looked at each other, hearing his dismissal, but did as he told them. They knew he was thinking
country cops.
But it was true, he wished they'd had the sense not to mill around in here, obscuring other prints, brushing the rough walls and leaving their own clothing fibers and follicles and danders everywhere. On the other hand, with a month or six months gone by already, a lot of that would be useless anyway. Between cop prints in the dirt on the floor, he could see a solid mesh of rat tracks and a sprinkling of droppings. Out in the big room, there'd no doubt be the footprints of hundreds of visitors, going back decades.

Mo stood back from the body, trying to visualize what had happened here. A woman wouldn't have come into a place like this alone, so either she came with the killer, meaning she knew him, or he caught her elsewhere and made her come here. Or, much less likely, killed her elsewhere and dragged her here.

He startled as a rat appeared in a crack in the foundation, slithered down the wall, and disappeared into another gap. He decided to get out of the room while he waited for the forensic team, and he walked back to the door, carefully stepping in the tracks of the others.

He looked over the big room, the dim light just revealing the rubble on the ground. It was a lousy place to die, lonesome and scary and filthy. What had happened here? What had the killer done to her? How long had it taken? The stacked and arranged geometries in the rubble everywhere nagged at him, signifying a horrible compulsion. Ordering,
controlling,
the environment. It was all about control. He experienced an unwanted flashback to O'Connor's house, the awful contorted person on the wall. The vision stabbed at him before he shut it down with an effort.

From reading the Howdy Doody files on Friday, he knew that the cause of death was strangulation by the line around the neck. The head wounds had been made by antique ice tongs—when they'd caught Ronald Parker, the Howdy Doody killer, they'd found the tongs in his car, the points of which matched the wounds on his victim's temples. Between the strings and the arrangements of objects, it was clear that the ritual centered on
control,
the killer manipulating his victims absolutely. Nobody had answered the question of whether Parker had done the arranging of objects before, during, or after the killing, or what exactly it signified.

Mo agreed with Marsden, Ronald Parker was the one, no mistake. He had been caught in his car, four months ago, speeding away from his last attempted kill, and the police had found a spool of plastic line, disposable handcuffs, tongs, and other paraphernalia in his trunk. They had established that he'd had prior contact with at least two of the victims. His background matched the profile developed by the FBI's Behavioral Sciences people and the independent shrink they'd consulted, and they had looked forward to running psych tests. Mapping the mind of the monster.

But Parker wasn't answering any questions. On his second night behind bars, he had hung himself in his cell, using the leg of his prison pants. Guards had found him in time to save his life, but not his mind: He sustained severe brain damage from oxygen deprivation. One of the photos in Parker's file showed his cell after they'd removed him, the geometric arrangements of toilet paper, hairbrush, prison slippers. Yes, Parker was the one, but he wasn't in any condition to tell anybody much of anything.

Mo listened to the silence in the cave like room. It was a scary place, even for a six-foot cop armed with a Glock-17, even during daytime, even with a bunch of other cops just outside. It must have been terrifying for the victim, an agony of fear before the physical agonies began.

He walked farther back into the big, dim room, his flashlight illuminating little more than the ground in front of his feet. Rearing up from the rubbled floor were two large, tapering brick columns, eight feet wide at the base, once maybe ten feet tall but now crumbling and raining loose bricks. At one time they must have been the main support for massive floor timbers, but now they stood solitary, twenty feet apart, casting pools of darkness that the ghost of light from above didn't penetrate. He approached one of them warily, hating the darkness, his right hand traveling to the nylon of his holster and the soothing weight of his gun. It was an irrational fear, the killer was long gone. Given the age of this corpse, it was probably Parker, already behind bars.

The stepped bricks of the tapered columns had been decorated. In the beam of his flashlight, he saw beer cans set neatly on each little shelf and surrounded by chips of broken glass. All this organizing and arranging must have taken hours. Did the killer talk while he worked? Did he make the victim watch? Did he arrange for a while, torture for a while, arrange again?

No,
Mo knew suddenly. Abruptly he knew how it worked, saw it clearly in his mind's eye. The image sickened him.

Bam! a
metallic blow echoed in the big room. Mo's heart answered with a series of punches inside his chest.

Bam!
again, and he realized it was the Buchanan cops starting work on the front door. Sounded as if they were using sledgehammers, for Christ's sake. But maybe it meant that the others had arrived. He got himself under control and began walking toward the entrance, thinking that maybe he'd take a couple minutes of sunshine before coming back down.

7

T
UESDAY, THINGS BEGAN TO coalesce. Mo managed to reach Biedermann, who sounded like a chilly son of a bitch, and scheduled a meeting with him down at the FBI Manhattan field office later in the day. Then he got hold of the secretary for Dr. In galls, the consulting psychologist who had worked on the Howdy Doody profiling with the FBI's Behavioral Sciences Unit, and was lucky enough to step into the gap left by a canceled lunch meeting.

The White Plains police and St. Pierre had done some good legwork, establishing that while no one in Daniel O'Connor's neighborhood had seen anything particularly suspicious, several neighbors had noticed O'Connor's car in his driveway all day Thursday. A visit to the copy shop he'd managed revealed that he'd been at work on Wednesday but hadn't shown on Thursday. The day staff had wondered where he was and had left messages on his answering machine, but they thought maybe they'd gotten the staffing calendar screwed up and so hadn't gotten alarmed until Friday.

The corpse in the Buchanan power station had been removed, and the Forensic Identification Unit had made casts of her teeth and photos to be distributed to dentists and orthodontists. From a quick inspection of the degree of fusion of the pubic symphysis of her pelvic bones, Angelo had guessed the victim's age to be late twenties, and he declared her blond hair natural. He measured a humerus and provisionally set her height at five-four. So St. Pierre had started a database search for reports of Caucasian, late-twenties blondes over five-two gone missing within the last year.

The psychologist maintained an office on eighty-fifth Street, an upper-crusty neighborhood not far from central Park. Mo drove down on the Saw Mill Paver Parkway, segued onto the Henry Hudson, joined the backed-up cars at the toll station. The big city gathering around him, the view of the cramped New Jersey shore across the water, the odor of some pollutant that smelled like burning chocolate: It made him nostalgic. A spring day, the trees busted out with leaves and blossoms, the sky looking celebratory despite global warming and the New Jersey factory chimneys. He'd lived just north of the great colossus of Manhattan all his life, had come in through its various gateways thousands of times, and yet he never got over the feeling of pleasurable excitement and trepidation it gave him to be wrapped in its dark, dirty, gutsy bear hug. What had he thought he'd do with his life when he was twelve and would come down with his father to go to the Natural History Museum?Dad had done a decent job of encouraging Mo's love of things historical, archaeological, maybe envisioning a scholarly career for him, who knows. If asked where he'd be twenty-seven years later, twelve-year-old Mo would probably have said he'd be doing archaeological expeditions in exotic locations when he wasn't living in his fancy penthouse with a view of the Park. And he'd probably have said he'd be married to Deborah Weinstein, a blond, early-developing girl in seventh grade who for an entire semester had embodied for him the feminine mystique. She used to write him tantalizingly flirtatious but disappointingly vague letters in a round, pneumatic-looking script with smiley faces in the O's.

So how close was he? Now he was thirty-nine and had just broken up with the fourth major love of his life, he was lonely and horny and lived in his ex's mom's house, now even more hollow with the removal of Carla's stuff. He was an underpaid cop feeling alone in the police society that was his only contact with human beings. He spent his time investigating sickos who hurt or killed people, and the closest he got to archaeology was poking around in the desiccated remains of murder victims in abandoned Hudson Paver power stations.

Mo realized that this level of self-esteem was not going to sustain him through the forthcoming meetings with high-powered shrinks and successful G-men. He made an effort to pump himself back up.

He missed the Ninety-sixth Street exit and had to continue on down to seventy-ninth, where he got off and headed back up through the little streets, delayed by street repairs. But then the gods of Manhattan bestowed one of their quixotic little miracles, the sudden appearance of a parking place just where he needed it, and he got to the appointment with Dr. Ingalls on time.

Dr. Rebecca Ingalls's office was on the fourth floor of an elegant older building with marble floors and a big elevator of walnut and polished brass. He found the office door open and went in to find the secretary he'd talked to on the phone. A little sign on her desk told him her name was Marie Devereaux. She looked to be in her late sixties, as dour-faced as he'd expected from her telephone voice. She greeted him dubiously and asked him to wait on one of the leather-upholstered chairs, but before he could sit down the inner door opened and a big-boned, blond woman in her mid-thirties came out, laughing as she flipped some papers onto the desk.

She said to Marie Devereaux, "Look at this! Those complete and utter yo-yos! Can you believe it?"

Marie Devereaux looked over the papers and allowed her eyebrows to rise.

"Honest to god!" the blonde said. She turned to Mo and included him in the moment: "Can't tell you the joke, but it involves the bookkeeping practices of one of the institutions I do consulting for. Marie and I had a bet, and she just won. Damn!"

"What'd you win?" Mo asked.

"Tickets to a Mets game," Marie Devereaux said primly. "Detective Ford, this is Dr. In galls."

Mo tried not to show his surprise. He had read parts of her profiles of the Howdy Doody killer, insightful but technical, and he'd learned that she was highly regarded in psychological circles, author of several influential books. He'd expected a woman like the secretary: older, serious, stuffy in a Viennese, turn-of-the-century sort of way.

Dr. Ingalls invited him back into her office, and he followed her into a large corner room with tall windows and a collection of potted fig and lemon trees. Desk with laptop computer, a pair of couches facing each other, several comfortable-looking chairs. Ansel Adams photos of Yosemite on the walls along with some wild crayon drawings by kids, all nicely framed. An antique buffet covered with carved wooden bird sand rainbow-hued blown-glass vases. A floor-to-ceiling bookshelf covered one wall, but there was no sign of dark leather chaiselongues or the other somber furnishings Mo unconsciously expected in a shrink's office.

Dr. Ingalls stood expectantly at her desk. "Hungry? This is lunch, right?"

"Sure, food would be nice."

That seemed to please her. "Can we just order out? There's a fabulous Chinese takeout just two blocks over, they'll bring it up, we can have a picnic here . . . ?" She waited for his nod, then picked up the phone, tapped a number from memory.

He watched her as she ordered, still feeling a little stunned by her informality, her unpretentiousness, her looks. She wore a blue dress, mid calf length, and in her heels she was nearly his height. Big-boned, solidly built, yes, but a good figure. Thick golden hair, a face too wholesome to be pretty exactly, but nice blue eyes, big easy smile. Not at all what he'd expected.

When she got off the phone, she took him back toward the two couches, sat him in one, and settled herself opposite him, a coffee table in between. "I hope you don't mind," she said. "Eating here, I mean. I'm just starved, and we only have this hour. We'll cover more ground if we don't have to go out."

"So how do you like New York?"Mo asked. He was glad to see that surprised her a little, evened them up a bit.

"Is that astute observation, or just an indication you've read my bio?"

"Observation, but it doesn't require any astuteness. Your accent, your informality—Midwest,right?"

She feigned chagrin. "Can't hide it, huh? But you're right. Southern Illinois born and bred, fed on sweet corn and fresh dairy. I did my post grad work at Columbia, so I lived here then, then returned to Chicago for some years. I moved back here a year ago, and I've loved every minute. How about yourself?"

"New York area, all my life." He shrugged.

"Marie says you want to talk about Ronald Parker and my profiling work for the FBI. What brings it up? I should warn you, I've got to be a little careful here, they're planning to use me as a witness at his trial. Among other testimony, I'll bring in his match to the psych profile I established."

"There's been another murder, up in White Plains. It fits everything I know about Ronald Parker's MO. If there's a copycat out there, I figured the best starting place for his profile is what you guys put together about Parker. I'm meeting this afternoon with the special agent in charge, and my guess is we'll end up reactivating the Howdy Doody task force—you'll no doubt hear from him."

Hearing that there'd been a copycat murder clearly troubled her. Her eyebrows became tildes, two gentle S-curves, and she took a moment before answering carefully, "Ronald Parker is by far the most disturbing case I've been involved with. For a number of reasons."

"Such as? I don't mean to make you go over familiar ground, but this only fell into my lap a couple of days ago. I'm not up on the details." Mo took out his pocket notebook and pen.

Again Dr. Ingalls seemed to need a moment to frame her answer. She got up, tucked her hair into a pony tail, and secured it with a bunchy blue hair band. She went to the window and leaned on the sill, then turned and sat against it, facing him again.

"Erik Biedermann will push you out, Mr. Ford," she said."He'll structure the task force so that he pilots it and the State Police don't have any say in the direction of the investigation. He'll explain that it's a case of unusual complexity, best left to the 'real pros.' That being the case, do you really need to know the details? I'm just trying to save you time and energy here."

Mo found himself bristling. He'd never met Biedermann, but he'd never heard anything positive said about him. An arrogant Fed, probably a glory hog, with contempt for the various regional police organizations he had to interface with. Mo felt a flash of guilt, thinking of his own reactions to the Buchanan police:
country cops.

"We'll have to see about that," he told her."I'm—" He tried to think of a way to say it that wouldn't sound like some kind of macho posturing, then thought of Dr. In galls's frankness and spontaneity and decided the hell with it, he'd reciprocate. "I don't usually give as hit what guys like Biedermann want. I'll make my own decisions about my own cases. What I need to know, what I do. We're pros, too. With better solve and conviction rates than the FBI."

She looked at him dubiously, but then grinned. It was nice to see the smile again, Mo decided, you could get hooked on making this woman smile.

"Let me start with Ronald Parker," she began. She crossed her arms and he rankles, a nice shape against the window light. "What I'll do is, I'll conflate what I theorized about him in advance of his capture—much of which proved to be accurate—and what we now know about his background. If we're after a copycat, we'll want to draw any parallels from facts, not guesses."

Mo nodded, clicked his pen.

Okay, she said. What did we know from the victimology? Both men and women, an unusual pattern for organized serial killers, who usually strike only one gender. At first, she and the Behavioral Sciences profilers had wondered whether the killer might be bisexual. But given that there was no evidence of sexual assault upon the victims, a better guess would be that the choice of victims stemmed from the specifics of the killer's childhood trauma. Serial crimes were often symbolic reenactments of or retributions for psychological injuries sustained in childhood, abuses most often committed by parents, stepparents, or other relatives. The evenhandedness of this killer suggested he had been abused by both genders, maybe both mother and father, or at least
blamed
both parents.

Too, there was a disturbing consistency in the appearance of the victims. All were blond-haired and light complexioned, medium to tall in height. This suggested, again, that the murders were symbolic retributions or reenactments, and Dr. Ingalls suspected the killer would prove to be blond and light-skinned, either because the original abusers were his parents and he'd have inherited their looks or because he was reenacting his own trauma and the victims were surrogate "selves."

"So then we looked at the mode of death itself," she said. "The use of handcuffs, the suspension of the victims using fishline, and the meticulous organization of the objects at the murder scene told us this was all about
control
—exercising absolute control over the victims and their personal spaces was central to the psychological narrative. There are a great number of ways to exercise control, and the specific technique in this case suggested that the murderer had once been similarly controlled, maybe tied up. We even made a note that we might find scarring on the wrists or ankles of the killer, and sure enough, Ronald Parker shows evidence of prior dermal trauma at both sites. I'll show you."

Dr. Ingalls rummaged in a file cabinet and came out with two photographs, which she handed to Mo. There was one close-up of hands and forearms, another of lower legs and feet. She sat next to him on the couch and pointed out the barely visible, irregular lines of paler skin. "These are Ronald Parker's wrists and ankles. We were right that his murders reenacted his own earlier trauma."

Mo was impressed. He tried not to be conscious of her proximity, the smell of her hair, but failed. She got up again and returned to the window, Mo railing at himself for his adolescent vulnerability to the nearness of a beautiful woman. And then that thought hit him on the bounce—was she beautiful? Since when? Looking at her now, he decided, yes, very much so, just not in the typical ways. Jesus, he was in lousy shape, he thought. And Dr. Ingalls was sharp, she'd see it in him.