Puppets (12 page)

"I don't like it when you tell me how to live," she said.

"I'm not, I'm just—"

"I thought I should tell you this!Okay? Have I ever done this before? Have I ever made exaggerated claims about any of this? You
know
I'm a skeptical person, you
know
I wouldn't tell you this if I didn't think it was important. God, I knew you'd laugh at me and feel superior—"

"Carla, Jesus, I'm not
laughing
—"

"How many times have you told me about one of your cases and how your'gut' or your 'instinct' or your fucking'radar' steered you in the right direction? That every investigator does it that way, that it's vital to police work. Right? So, what, I'm not supposed to use those same things when I'm figuring out somebody's personal problems? Or when I get clear signals from my own goddamned 'radar'? Maybe you should face up to your own hypocrisy!"

She was right, he'd never quite thought of it that way. But reflexively he tossed it back at her:"Another way I single-handedly fucked up our relationship."

She stood up quickly. He tied to hold her arm, but she shook his hand loose. "I've got to go. It's very late. I left some of my CDs here."

"Look,I'm sorry. You're right." He let her see his desperation. And she paused, looking down at him, those fine cheekbones and dark eyes. He could feel the nearness of her body, her smooth olive skin and supple waist arid her sweet summer-night smell. After another moment he said quietly, "Stay here with me tonight, Carla."

For an instant she almost seemed to consider it. Then she turned away, went to the shoebox of CDs on the floor, began sorting through it. He watched as she found several and then went to the closet, where she dug around inside and pulled out a pair of her sandals.

He walked her to the front door, stood in the dark hall with her.

"I don't know what it means," she said. "I guess, just take care of yourself."

"I will. Thanks. You, too, okay?"

Then she was out the door and stepping lightly down the front porch steps, a fey shadow in the hot night air. He watched until she'd gotten into her car and pulled out, thinking,
Believe me, Carla, I'm not
laughing.

Later, he was still awake, lying naked on the bed in the dark, too hot to cover himself even with a sheet. The empty house bothered him. Carla's description of the"place" being dark with apertures of light, with the ambience of that patch of woods full of death, stayed with him. You could picture it all kinds of ways. It could be the power station, for example, a big dark place where bad things had happened. Or it could even be this house, the empty, dark rooms with tree shadows cutting the streetlight into sharp blue shards, and the hurting that had happened was what they'd done to each other as the relationship began to fall apart. Or someplace else. Or nowhere but Carla's imagination, something going wrong with her.

This was nuts, he'd have to get another place. This house was perfectly nice and he really
hated
it. He felt the empty rooms upstairs, the basement down below, sandwiching him between layers of darkness. After another hour, he sat up, took the Glock out of its holster. Glocks were weird guns, he hadn't initially endorsed the State Police shift to the Glock over the old Smith & Wesson Model 65 because he didn't like the feel of the Glock—the overlarge, too square hand grip, the blocky barrel. But they fired nicely, had a reliable magazine and a manageable recoil. And once you learned it, the trigger was sweet. In the State Police you were trained to walk toward your target, emptying your whole magazine, and some Glock advocate had once said, if your adversary could still get off a shot at you after you'd fired eighteens hots from one of these babies, you
deserved
to die.

Mo got up, holding the gun, and prowled through the house. He hated the pressure of the empty rooms and the acid light in them, and he wanted to strike back at them, push back the perimeter.
What is
this, Ford,
he asked himself,
angry at what you're scared of, or scared of
what you're angry at?
He walked stealthily through the living room with its glistening floors, then the hall, holding the gun as if he expected to use it.
Come on,
he thought,
come and get it.
He went up the stairs just as quietly. Long hallway to either side, six dark doorways. Stopping to listen, hearing only his own heart and the occasional slight tick and rustle of the house, two A.M. and only now beginning to cool down. He leapt through into each room, one after the other, landing with legs wide in shooting stance and pivoting quickly left and right. Dark, empty rooms, stuffy air, shiny floors, bare windows with a few dead flies vaguely visible on the sills.

Come on,
he thought furiously.
Come at me.

But there was nothing there, as he knew there wouldn't be. He was prowling naked and mad and scared around his ex's mom's house, hunting nothing but Mo Ford's loneliness, and he knew it, and no goddamned Glock was going to be any help at all.

18

O
NE DAY FOR THE NEW baby, for the tired wife, for the nesting instinct, and then St. Pierre was back at work bright and early Friday. Mo almost said something, but then thought Mike might take it the wrong way. They got back into the routine with only a few words about Mike's domestic life.

They decided to divvy up Irene Bushnell's mother and husband, then rendezvous back at the power station to assess the scene again, try to figure what it might reveal that the O'Connor home did not. St. Pierre took the mother, who lived in Tarrytown, leaving Mo to drive to the victim's home outside of Ossining, ten minutes farther north.

He drove with one hand on the wheel, the other rubbing his eyes. He'd slept for maybe two hours. After his existential hunt through the house, he'd gone to bed and dropped off to sleep. But after only a few minutes, the phone had rung. The bedroom was still pitch-dark, and the clock told him it was almost four A.M. He groped for the phone, knocked it off the table, found it in the tangle of clothes on the floor. When he finally he got the receiver right and put it to his head, his voice was a croak. "Mo Ford," he said.

"Detective Ford," the voice said. "You wanted my assistance."

"Gus," he said. "Thanks for returning my call—"

"What do you need?" Grisbach's voice seemed barely capable of the expressiveness needed to make a question. Although he'd never met Grisbach, Mo had a clear image of him: somewhere in Manhattan in a darkened apartment filled with arcane high tech, pale-skinned and hugely fat in his wheelchair, a spider at the center of his web.

"I was hoping you could get me information on—this is a little touchy—on an FBI guy. I'm involved in a task force, I just figured I should know more about who this guy is so that—"

"Name?"

Mo felt a moment of relief. He'd been afraid that looking into a federal agent might be beyond Grisbach's reach, or something he wouldn't want do for any number of reasons. Fortunately, it looked as if his first hunch was right: Gus's past career had left him with a city cop's typical distrust and dislike of the FBI. "Erik Biedermann," he said. "Currently SAC in the Manhattan field office, formerly out in San Diego. Supposedly fought in Vietnam, I don't know which service. I'm particularly interested in his work on maybe two murders in the San Diego area, maybe two, three years ago. Anything you can find out about his transfer here. Any connections to, uh, other agencies." When Mo stopped, he could hear the tapping of keys at the other end.

"Anything else?"

Mo thought about it. "A guy named Zelek. Anson Zelek, also FBI." Just out of curiosity.

Keys tapping, then: "I'll call you."

"Look,I'm really grateful—" Mo began. Then he'd realized that the line was already dead. No, Grisbach wasn't much for social niceties.

He'd rolled over and tried to go back to sleep, and then the alarm was ringing and it was time to getup. Daylight had been like sand in his eyeballs.

The address St. Pierre had given him for Byron Bushnell was a ranch house with dirty white-aluminum siding in a poorer, semirural neighborhood of similar homes. It was easy to find because it was the only lot on the road that contained a fifty-five-foot semi with a Kenmore tractor, a vehicle bigger than the house itself. Mo parked on the worn grass next to a white Toyota pickup and got out. A movement in the window caught his eye, and then Byron Bushnell opened the front door.

Bushnell looked like shit. He was a smallish man with sloping shoulders and longhair, T-shirt, jeans worn low on his hips, cigarette in his lips. His red, swollen eyes suggested he'd been crying or drinking or both, and the smell of stale cigarette smoke hit Mo like a wall as he came up the steps. When Mo introduced himself and offered condolences, Bushnell just turned around and made an ambiguous gesture with the back of his hand. He went back into the house, threw himself on a recliner, fumbled on a side table for a can of Bud. He put aside his cigarette to suck at the can, looking at Mo with crazed, hostile eyes.

"I'm hoping you can tell me more about your wife, something that will help us identify her killer—her contacts in the community, her friends, her job, what she did in her spare time, that kind of thing."
Also about her husband,
Mo thought. Copycat MO or not, you always started with the husband.

"You don't catch the fucker, I will," Bushnell said, "I'll fucking feed him his own nuts."

"We'll catch him. With your help." Bushnell was pretty unsteady, would require a lot of steering. Mo made a show of getting out his notebook and pen and looking officious. "Why don't we start with her employment? Did she work?"

"Why don't we start with you can go fuck yourself. Cops don't give a fuck about us, gonna hassle us every time, and now Irene's dead you're gonna do
what
for her?" Bushnell finished off his beer and flung the can across the room. It hit the wall and fell to the floor with several others. He stared at Mo with
I don't give a shit
in his eyes.

Mo paused, undecided on how to proceed. Bushnell was going to be a tough one.

After a moment Mo put down his notebook, went over to the beer cans on the floor, picked them up one by one, put them on the dining table. The last one he held up as he looked back at Bushnell. "You got any more of these?"

The gesture took Bushnell by surprise. "Icebox," he said.

Mo went into a kitchen that made his own look like something out of
Good Housekeeping
and opened the refrigerator. It contained mostly beer of different brands. He broke a couple of cans out of their yoke, went back into the living room, and handed one to Bushnell. Mo popped the top on his, not really wanting to drink this early. But what the hell, he decided. He loosened his tie and took a seat at the dining table as he sipped.

It took a while, but he managed to wring some details out of Bushnell. Apparently Irene had worked five days a week at different houses for a cottage industry run by another local woman, a company called The Gleam Team. On the lifestyle side, she had church and her mother and some girlfriends down the road. Byron and Irene liked to catch stock car races when they could, and on weekends the two of them hung out at a couple of local bars. They played pool with an informal circle of regulars, Irene was pretty good. They had both grown up in the area, so ten years after graduation they still knew a lot of people from high school. Mo got the impression of a lifestyle stuck overlong in the fast-and-loose stage, a passionate but often rocky marriage, occasional run-ins with the local police for fighting or driving while intoxicated. No, Bushnell couldn't think of any altercations between Irene and anyone, nothing where anyone would have thought of her as controlling.

After an hour, Bushnell was running out of useful detail even as his nostalgia was gaining momentum, and Mo decided it was time to throw him a curve, see how he reacted."She sounds like a really great person," he said sympathetically. "You're hurting pretty badly, huh?"

Bushnell's face registered anger for an instant, the resistance of a man to emotional probing. And then the face crumpled and tears gushed from his eyes. "Six weeks she was gone, but I was still hoping, I kept hoping maybe . . . " His body folded forward as he wrapped around his pain and cried wrenchingly, the convulsive heaving of someone giving up to loss.

Scratch Bushnell as any kind of suspect,
Mo thought. He folded away his notebook, stood up, clapped Bushnell's quaking shoulder as he went out.

The power-station scene had changed completely. Mo bumped down the access road to find the parking area filled with cars, trucks, vans. Lots of federal license plates. He spotted St. Pierre's car among the others.

The whole building was ringed with yellow tape, and sections of the ground outside had been cordoned off. One of the FBI vehicles was a big Evidence Response Team technical van with satellite dishes on its roof, its back doors open and people working on equipment on the platform. Another was a truck-mounted generator running at a high idle and trailing heavy cables into the building. The sheer amount of resources in play meant that Biedermann was taking this very seriously.

Mo followed a pair of FBI techs around to the main door and was surprised to come face-to-face with Dr. Rebecca Ingalls. Her eyebrows jumped as she recognized him, and then she smiled.

He was conscious of not looking his best, but he returned the smile. "What are you doing here?" he asked.

She shrugged self-deprecatingly."I'm doing—what do they call the TV sportscasters, the ex-pros who don't call the plays but sit there and—"

"'Color.' You're doing color?"

"Yeah."She frowned. "I'm trying to do psychological background, the implications of choosing this place to kill her. What it means that it's not her home, what that tells us about this killer. I was downstairs, but I, um, I needed a break." She tilted her head back, shut her eyes, gave her face to the muted sun for a moment.

"I know what you mean. Any conclusions?"

She brought her chin back down. "No. Other than it's a terrible place to be tortured to death." Obviously, she wasn't enjoying this visit to the Westchester countryside.

Mo nodded. The sheet metal over the main doors had been removed and the front of the big brick building gaped into the open air. Faint voices echoed inside, and a fetid, humid smell wafted up out the dark opening.

"Erik's inside," she said.

"Too bad." Mo scuffed at the fractured concrete of the walk.

That gave her a little amusement.

He hesitated, then started inside. But she called to him, "I was talking to your colleague—Mike, right?He's such a sweet young man. He thinks you're the greatest, you know." That was flattering, Mo thought, surprised. Rebecca went on, "He has complete faith you'll solve this, that nobody could stop you, you're another Sherlock Holmes. Also that Erik is the Antichrist."

Better and better,
Mo thought. "St. Pierre's a good guy," he acknowledged,"but he only moved up to Major Crimes a couple of months ago."

She caught his eyes quickly before turning back to the sun."I'll be down again in a few minutes," she said.

The lower level of the power station was bathed in lights. Biedermann's people had set pole lights at all four corners of the big room, three brilliant panels on each, and two more light installations shone down from the stair railing. In the light, the place looked worse, filthy and moldy, full of dead vegetation, used condoms, other trash. There were probably twenty ERT people in the rubble now, crouching or standing with heads down, scanning the ground. Mike St. Pierre sat on the bottom step, looking a little overwhelmed.

"Hey," Mo said, coming down behind him.

"Hey."

"Where's Biedermann?"

"Back in the murder room. He's just now letting people get to work, they had photographers in here for a couple of hours, don't trust ours to do a good job."

"Is he telling you anything?"

St. Pierre shrugged, scuffed at the layer of dust and soil on the broken concrete floor. "The dirt's a good thing, something not at any of the residences. Footprints, signs of struggle might tell us more about how it went down. They did these overhead photos, scene mapping. Biedermann acts like he'd like to take the place down and reassemble it somewhere, like an airplane crash. But I was gonna tell you—"

But he stopped as Rebecca came down the stairs to stand beside them with a determined expression. The three of them looked over the scene for a moment, not speaking. Seeing this much focused human industry in one place was impressive.

"So what do you think happened here?" Mo asked her at last.

"Something went wrong," she said immediately. "This wasn't part of the plan."

" 'Plan'?" St. Pierre asked.

"Not 'plan' exactly. But this was a mistake, a slip of control."

"And it's about control,"Mo mused.

She nodded. "Erik had his crew do some video with overhead boom cameras. He's looked at sections of it, thinks there are indications of a struggle, maybe even of sexual assault. From marks in the dirt and other trash—you can't really see it from ground level."

That was smart, Mo admitted grudgingly. Biedermann was exploiting the particulars of this anomalous scene to maximum advantage. And if Irene Bushnell had been raped before she was killed, it did signal a radical departure from the Howdy Doody MO. Still, all the evidence in the world, short of finding fingerprints they could match with prints on record somewhere, wouldn't help them locate the killer. Mo's instincts told him the answer lay with tracing Irene Bushnell's contacts with other people. Somewhere, her world had intersected the killer's world, she had caught his attention. Somehow, he had gotten her to this place. He thought of Byron Bushnell, the possibilities that their social life suggested, The Gleam Team, her church. And he'd bet good money he and St. Pierre and the local contacts of the NYSP could do a better job than the federals at following up on those things.

"So what's he looking for here?" Mo asked."What's he expect to find?"

Rebecca answered immediately,"Sometimes it's almost as if he already knows who it is and hopes to find verification of that from trace evidence." Then she looked surprised at herself, as if she hadn't intended to say so much. She frowned, then pointed with her chin back toward the death-room door. "But why don't you ask Erik?"