Puppets (6 page)

She went on, looking troubled again: "We thought we were smart, but there were some things we never did pull together. We didn't get to question Parker before he—you know about this?— before he hanged himself, gave himself brain damage. He's not going to be able to tell us certain things."

"Like—?"

"The arranging. What exactly it signified to him, how it pertained to the original abuse he suffered. Also the use of the ice tongs on the head, why he wanted to injure them that particular way. Also whether he did the arranging before, during, after—"

"He didn't do the arranging," Mo said. He remembered the insight that had come to him down in the musty bowels of the power station. "Or rather, he didn't do it directly. Everybody assumed the reason why his fingerprints were never found on the objects, or anywhere, was because he wore gloves—"

"He had a box of latex gloves in the car when they caught him."

"He
did
wear gloves. But he didn't do the arranging. His victims did. While he held their strings. While he' turned their heads, moved them from place to place with the ice tongs sunk into their temples."

"Oh, Jesus," Dr. Ingalls said. She went quickly to sit down on the other couch.

"You said yourself it was about control. Parker moved them like puppets. The whole point of the arrangements was just to exercise control—not so much on the environment, on the
victims.
To savor his ability to manipulate a living person absolutely. For hours and hours."

"Oh, God." She looked as if she could visualize it too clearly. "We . . . we assumed the victim's fingerprints were on things because he always killed in their houses, and . . . and you'd expect their prints to be there. But it was also because
they
did the arranging. He
made
them. How horrible!" She blew out a breath, shook her head, troubled. But then she smiled again,
wham,
a solid Plains-states smile, unabashedly appreciative. "You are one smart cop! You've had this case for what, four days? I'm impressed!"

Mo savored that for a second or two. And then Marie Devereaux put her head through the door. "Your lunch is here," she told them disapprovingly.

8

T
HEY ATE FROM PAPER plates, sitting on opposite sides of the coffee table and leaning forward over white cartons of moo shee pork, kung pao chicken, egg rolls, white rice, wonton soup. Dr. Ingalls hitched her skirt up to facilitate eating, still demure just above the knee, and spread several napkins on her lap. She ate like a stevedore, shoveling the food off her plate directly into her mouth with deft pivots of the chopsticks, smacking her lips. The food was great, Mo hadn't realized how hungry he was.

After a while, Mo said, "You don't seem like a person who would go into forensic psychology."

"I'm not!My main field is child psychology. My whole FBI connection is an accident—they consulted me on some letters from a child being held by kidnappers. Wanted me to get clues about her emotional state, maybe about the identity of her abductors or the location where they were holding her. I got a lot of things right, so they began calling me in on other things, not directly child-related. Given that adult psychoses usually result from childhood trauma, profiling really benefits from a developmental psychology perspective. I'm not proud of the fact, but I apparently have a talent for deducing the mental states of bad guys. So they keep coming to me."

She wiped her mouth with a napkin and licked her lips. "But thank you. If I may say so, you don't strike me as a person who would go into homicide investigation."

"How so?"

"Well,you're too thoughtful, you're too self-critical,you're too uncomfortable with death and pain. I'd have pegged you as, oh, a historian, or a writer of popular books on something like archaeology or current science issues—" She looked at him penetratingly, observing that she'd scored hits.

"What else," he said, feeling a little exposed.

"Divorced recently." And then she looked surprised at herself."I'm sorry, that's—"

"It's that obvious, huh? How about you?"

She shrugged and went back to her eating, selecting a blackened, curled chili, looking at it closely before cautiously nipping the end of it. "I was . . . engaged . . . in Chicago. He couldn't relocate. It fell apart after a couple of months of living a thousand miles apart." She made a face at the chili's burn or the recollection.

"Which would seem predictable," Mo said. "Prompting questions about why you moved to begin with."

But she pulled away with a frown, leaning against the couch back. "I think we're getting off the topic, Detective Ford. I'd like to get back to Ronald Parker."

So her candor had its limits, Mo thought, and she could be hard, businesslike, if she needed to be."Yes," he agreed.

She glanced at her watch and offered as an explanation or apology, "Only because I'm conscious of the time—I have another appointment in fifteen minutes—"

"Goa head."

"Okay. What else did we know about him in advance? Above average height and weight, in good physical condition. That one was simple—four of his victims were men, in generally good shape, and it would take at least parity in strength to overcome them. Also, it would take considerable strength to hoist people up as he tied them to the eyelets."

Mo nodded, remembering O'Connor's weight as he came off the wall.

"High intelligence and good organizational skills, seen in the amount of planning, the assembly in advance of tools and materials, the observation of victims' living habits—he had to ascertain that he could have them in his control for many hours without risk of interruption. We also saw high intelligence, maybe even police experience, in his ability to avoid leaving trace evidence at the scenes. The plastic police handcuffs also suggested a law enforcement background. We were wrong there. But education, we theorized a bachelor's degree at least and Parker had a BS." Dr. Ingalls frowned at herself. "Is any of this helpful at all?"

"Absolutely." Mo looked at his notebook and realized that for all she'd told him, he hadn't made it halfway through his list of questions. He was aware of the time ticking away. "So who
is
Ronald Parker—what's his personal history?"

"As we'd guessed, he was an adopted child. His parents are now dead, and we have no proof of abuse other than the ligature scars on his wrists and ankles. But adoptive, step-, or foster parents account for seventy percent of child abuse. He grew up in New Jersey and New York. Interestingly, he himself went 'missing' about two years before we caught him. I believe at that point his pathology overwhelmed him, and he could no longer maintain the persona of normalcy, so he went undercover when he started killing. We're not sure what pushed him over the brink, made him leave a snug job as a bank teller in Newark. We still don't know where he was or what he did during his two years out of view. But we're afraid there may be other victims we haven't located yet or don't yet recognize as his. He may have spent the two years 'warming up' for the fully developed ritual. If often takes a serial murderer several tries to identify the acts which best satisfy his compulsions."

"Okay,"Mo said. "Have we got time for one more? I don't know if you need prep time for your next appointment, or—"

"You're very considerate. Sure, we have time for one more." She said it graciously, but she had begun packing away the food cartons, tidying up.

Mo stood to help her. "Okay. So what connected the victims to him? How did he select them?" This would be critical if they were going to anticipate what the copycat did next.

To his surprise, Dr. Ingalls seemed to become distinctly uncomfortable. She grabbed the cartons and shoved them into the take-out bag, her movements brusque and businesslike."This was a difficult point for the whole task force, and no one has ever established his connections to all the victims. But we believe he chose them from chance encounters and professional contacts on two criteria. First, that they looked like his archetypal persecutor, the tallish blonde, mid-twenties to mid-forties. Second, that in the course of their contact they somehow'controlled' him. We know that he made contact with one victim through the bank where he worked and she was a customer. Apparently she accused him of shortchanging her when she cashed a check, and she raised a fuss about it that no doubt gave him a lot of stress. Another was a mechanic who had worked on his car. Parker believed the man had taken too long to replace the clutch and then overcharged him. In both cases, we see people 'controlling'Parker, and Parker exacting retribution by asserting his own control—absolute control unto the death. The others, we're still not sure how they came to his attention, but we're assuming a similar pattern. They had the bad luck to look like some manipulative monster from Parker's past and to interact with him in such away that he felt controlled by them."

Mo gave that a moment's thought. Serial murder often progressed by a predictable general sequence of events, starting with the procurement phase. This was when the intentional, organized killer selected the victim. Usually the victims were people who somehow fit into the killer's mental world in some specific way—their appearance was right, or their professional roles, or their living habits. Something brought them to his attention and made them seem desirable targets. The killer increasingly incorporated the victims into his delusional scheme as he learned more about their habits and worked out how to gain access to them. The problem was that without some pattern of connection between victims—physical and material, not just some warped psychological link in the killer's mind—it was next to impossible to catch a serial murderer.

"So," Mo said, "given all this, how'd he get caught? I know he botched an attempt and was caught fleeing the scene. How did that go down?"

But Dr. Ingalls was looking unhappy. She didn't answer immediately. Instead she bunched up the trash bag and stuffed it into a wastebasket. Then she sat down in the chair behind the desk, and Mo got the distinct sense she had retreated to the shelter there.

"The FBI took a proactive role," she said. "And it worked. And now, yes, I would like some prep time, thank you. It has been a pleasure, detective ford."

He almost called her on her sudden chilly formality, she seemed like the kind of person you could challenge that way. But then the dry voice of Marie came out of the intercom:"Your one o'clock is here."

Dr. Ingalls stood to shake his hand. "Good luck with SAC Biedermann," she said with a touch of sarcasm.

He went to the door, trying to overcome his feeling of being dismissed, angry with himself for expecting anything different. She was watching him as she took the band off her ponytail and shook her hair loose, a disorderly blond fountain that covered her face for a moment before she brushed it quickly back into a more professional-looking coif.

"I may need to consult with you again—" he began.

"Certainly. I'll make every effort to accommodate whenever feasible. Just call Marze, and she'll schedule it."

He felt shitty as he opened the door. But then she surprised him, calling, "I enjoyed our lunch, Mr.Ford." When he glanced back, she was briskly sorting papers at her desk. She didn't look at him, but he was glad to see her smile as she worked. Immediately he felt a lot better.

9

T
HE FBI MANHATTAN FIELD office was in the Federal Building, miles south of Dr. Ingalls's office. With a couple of hours to kill before the three o'clock meeting, Mo opted to drive down, leave the car in a lot near Chinatown, and walk the rest of the way to Federal Plaza. It was a good day to walk, not hot enough to work up a big sweat, and he had always liked this part of Manhattan. If you managed to step out from under the cloud of cynicism over your head, you could get off on the sheer diversity of human beings, the innumerable sizes and shapes and colors of them, the endlessly surprising things they did. Even the air, the piss smell of the masonry, the rotting-food aromas of garbage cans, the suffocating diesel belches of buses, seemed rich with nutrients he was sure fortified the blood.

He bought a little bag of candied peanuts and munched them as he strolled. There was a lot he hadn't asked Dr. Ingalls. In fact, there was no guarantee that the things she or Biedermann could tell him about Ronald Parker would necessarily apply to a copycat. The copycat killer operated under yet another layer of psychological complexity, his close identification with a previous killer making it even harder to guess his motives and next moves.

One of the things he'd have to get from Biedermann would be the really deep forensic details. A copycat could reasonably be expected to deviate from the original, if only because the new killer couldn't know everything about his role model's work. Mo's idea was to get a good sense of Ronald Parker, then focus on the new killer's departures from Parker's MO. The lab reports weren't in from the O'Connor murder, but so far he hadn't found any obvious departures. That is, unless the power station murder did prove to be the new killer, not just a previously undiscovered victim of Parker's. But whether by Parker or a copycat, the power station murder would be the first that didn't occur in the victim'sown home. That had to be significant. At the very least, fingerprints found on arranged objects could prove or disprove Mo's belief that the victims themselves had been forced to do the organizing.

If they hadn't already caught Parker and Mo had been called in on the new murders, he'd have assumed they were done by the same guy. It all came down to how closely the MOs matched. If they were too much alike, you'd have to consider some troubling alternatives.

Like what? A, the killer of O'Connor
was
the same guy who'd killed all the others, and Parker was the wrong guy. But they had Parker cold, the case against him was rock solid. So that would leave B, and this was kind of scary: Ronald Parker hadn't worked alone, and his accomplice was still out there, just now starting up again.

Of course, there was C, a third alternative that could explain closely matching MOs. This struck Mo as less likely still but in a way more scary. It
was
a copycat situation, but the new killer had access to inside information about the Parker investigation. Or was
involved
in the investigation.

He dodged a speed balling rollerblader, a tall black teenager who wore nothing but a G-string, iridescent green alien-eyeball shades, and Disc man headphones. The guy whipped down the sidewalk backward, graceful as Baryshnikov's shadow, weaving in and out between other pedestrians without looking, as if he had eyes in the back of his head.

The interruption was good, Mo decided as he watched the dancing figure recede. With his idea of an insider doing the new killing, he was getting ahead of himself. Best to wait, hear what Biedermann had to tell him.

His thoughts went back to Dr. Ingalls, Rebecca Ingalls, the nice buzz that had grown on him as they'd talked. He was being stupid, he decided, showing his vulnerability. He had long since decided that much of love was about marketability, about station. Everybody had an unconscious or at best barely conscious sense of their own marketability, of how desirable a partner they'd make. Maybe it was an assessment of looks, of sex appeal, of social class, of educational level, of how much money you had—an idea of yourself that you recognized when you glimpsed it in a prospective partner. You might hanker after somebody who was more marketable than you were, the way people got the hots for movie stars, but realistically you seldom went after those people. Relationships did occur between classes of overall desirability, but they seldom lasted. Because the partner who discerned he or she could do better would eventually try to do so.

Is that what had happened with Carla? Mo's sense of their relative marketability was that he held his own with her in terms of looks and smarts, but she came from family money and in the last year with her career taking off she had begun to sense she had opportunities he didn't. Time to move up another notch in the relationship department.

A pretty dismal view of love.

So what did all that have to do with Dr.Ingalls? he chided himself. New York was full of attractive but, to Mo, inaccessible women. It was inappropriate even to put her in the"prospective" category, a sign of his desperation and heart-hunger. She had pulled it all up short when she'd felt their conversation veering too far toward the personal. She was a professional. More importantly, she also knew what her marketability quotient was, and that she could do better than Mo Ford. She saw that, he saw that, end of story.

Feeling lousy again, Mo finished the peanuts, balled up the bag, tossed it at a trash canister, missed, retrieved it, and put it in. He had come up to Federal Plaza. Time to put on the act of being together and functional one more time.

Biedermann's office was on the twenty-fifth floor, a regular palace compared to the institutional, gray-surfaced cubicles his underlings got. Still, the room was done in federal cutback-era utilitarian, with short-pile gray carpeting, a massive enameled metal desk, Steel case desk chair, a small Formica conference table with six plastic chairs. On a set of shelves, Biedermann had allowed himself the luxury of a few personal decorations: pictures of the SAC with Al Gore, with Colin Powell, with Governor Pataki, with others Mo didn't recognize. A couple of pistol-shooting trophies, a citation or two. A heavy, red-leather,chrome-studded dog collar, and a big bowie knife mounted on an engraved plaque.

"You're wondering about the knife," Biedermann said. He was about two inches taller than Mo, with a military buzz cut gone white-blond, blue eyes in a tanned, strong-jawed face. His charcoal suit was well cut and made Mo envious, given that his only comparably stylish suit had been ruined by Big Willie.

"What's the story?" Mo asked. The knife was obviously a routine icebreaker for Biedermann.

"A joke. Used to work in Internal Affairs, out in the San Diego field office. You're never popular, understatement, when you're I A. So when I moved over to this job, the San Diego staff presented me with the knife. Said I'd stuck it in their backs long enough, I could keep it now."

Mo chuckled dutifully. He thought to ask about the dog collar, but there was a rap on the door frame and three people came into the room. Two were members of Biedermann's staff, a woman and a man who, Biedermann explained, had worked on the howdy Doody task force, Special Agents Lisa Morris and Esteban Garcia. They both carried manila file folders, edges trimmed with the red and white stripes that meant they were active case files. The third person Biedermann introduced as Anson Zelek, a tall, thin man in his early sixties with a tight, triangular face, small mouth, up-tilted eyes. He looked vaguely familiar, and then Mo realized he resembled the typical representation of a Roswell alien. He wondered if the look resulted from a face-lift.

Biedermann sat at the head of the table, Zelek off to one side of the room. Mo sat across from Morris and Garcia, savoring the draft of air-conditioning against the back of his neck. He asked them about the structure of the inter agency task force on the Howdy Doody case, and SA Lisa Morris listed the members: the FBI, the Manhattan and Bronx PDs, the New York DA's office, the New Jersey State and local cops. The Connecticut State Police and the Westchester DA's office had also been included because they wanted to be up to speed if the killer struck in their jurisdictions.

Then it was Mo's turn. He told them what he knew so far about the O'Connor murder and filled them in on the power station corpse. When he mentioned that he'd just come from a meeting with Dr. Ingalls, Biedermann looked at him penetratingly, more than a little interested. Zelek's tilted almond eyes seemed to perk up, too.

"She's very good, isn't she." Biedermann commented flatly.

"Yes, I thought so," Mo said."But our appointment today was a short-notice thing, I didn't have the time to ask all the questions I wanted to."

"What else did you want to know?"

"Well, I asked her how Parker got caught, and she said it resulted from a proactive strategy on your part. But she didn't give me any details."

The three agents at the table glanced at each other, and at Morris's questioning look Biedermann gave a little nod. He clearly intended to stay in charge of any information exchange here.

Morris was a smallish woman with red hair in a practical cut, and she spoke with a slight Southern accent. "We had very little to go on, and our killer was hitting about once a month. By the time he'd killed his sixth, we were starting to get a lot of pressure for an arrest. The last several kills were in Manhattan, the mayor put pressure onus, Washington said we had to get proactive. All we knew at the time was that the perpetrator selected tallish, blond victims, and that his murders seemed to be about striking back at people who'd controlled him. Controlling them in return. So we established a likely victim. It was a long shot that he'd notice. We got lucky, and I mean that sincerely." Again she gave Biedermann a look, a checkup:
You sure this is okay?

Mo felt obliged to break in. "I understood he killed people he'd encountered, but that nobody ever figured out how he acquired them all. How could you place someone in his way?"

Biedermann dipped his chin, and SA Morris went on, "Our profile suggested the perpetrator would follow press reports about his case, that public response to his crimes was one of his motivations. So we engineered a public relations effort. We identified a tallish, blond person we could set up through crafted news reports as a controlling figure, hoping he'd want to retaliate. As I said, we got lucky. We had the intended vic's apartment under surveillance, and when Parker came in, we were there."

It was beginning to come clear for Mo. Jesus. No wonder she hadn't wanted to talk about this part of it. No wonder she'd pulled away so fast.

"You used Dr.Ingalls," he said.

Biedermann took over. "She's arising star in the field, she'd just published a book that was getting her name in the news anyway. So, with her cooperation, we sether up in a series of articles. 'Super shrink closes in on Howdy Doody killer,' that kind of thing. 'FBI confident profiler will reveal killer's identity.' He had to feel manipulated by her. We scripted her press comments very, very carefully, framing her view of him in terms that would feel condescending, challenging, manipulative. He took the bait. We were lucky."

Mo thought about that for a moment. It had to have been scary as hell for Dr. Ingalls to walk around every day knowing she might be being procured by a very effective, sadistic serial killer. He asked, "So how'd it go down at the end?"

This time Biedermann nodded minutely to Garcia. Like Morris, Garcia was dressed perfectly, crisp white shirt, tie, dark suit. He was a barrel-chested man with a pronounced widow's peak, and as he talked, he gestured with thick, ring-encrusted fingers. "I was in tactical charge of the apprehension unit. By the time we had Dr. Ingalls in position, we knew his rhythm pretty well, knew within several days when he'd try again. We never did spot him as he picked her up, and we never saw him approach the building. Uh, but we had given her a wrist alarm, one of these Lifeline things, that she could press if anything happened, would ring at our end. And one night there he is, a guy walks into her bedroom, he's tall and blond and he's carrying a black duffel. She, uh, she activated her wrist alarm, fought with him, but he saw us starting to move in. We're not sure how he got away from the scene—" Garcia hesitated uncomfortably.

Mo was thinking,
Another FBI bungle.

"We can talk blame for a few mistakes," Biedermann broke in, "or we can talk
credit,
well-deserved
accolades,
for setting it up, for protecting Dr.Ingalls, and for catching him." He gave Mo a challenging glance, then nodded for Garcia to continue. "Give us the nutshell version, how about, Esteban?"

"He had only been with her for a few minutes, she wasn't badly hurt. When he evaded us at our perimeter, we gave a holler to the NYPD, and a black-and-white spotted him several blocks away."

"Good interagency cooperation," Biedermann put in, still watching Mo. Sitting back from the table, Zelek crossed his legs and looked mildly amused.

Garcia finished, "He resisted arrest before being subdued. In the car we found extra nylon handcuffs, a cordless drill, a pruning shears, the ice tongs, latex gloves, a whole roll of the fishline."

Mo looked at the three of them, and they watched him just as closely."Fish line," he said finally.

They caught each other's eyes.

"Not exactly fishline," Biedermann said. "A heavy-gauge poly line a lot like fish line."

"To be precise, a lawn-trimmer line," Mo said. "Serrated to cut weeds better."