Puppets

by Daniel Hecht

  "Thanks, Ty," Mo said. "I knew I could count on you."

  11

  VENGEANCE MUST BE APPROPRIATE in degree and in kind. That was certainly a guiding principle. How would you say it in Latin? the puppeteer wondered. Carve it onto a plaque, put it over the door of the house, like the grandiose mottoes universities posted over the administration building's main entrance. Lofty significations in a dead language, was that a nice irony or what?

  But of course it was not only about vengeance. For all that Machiavelli and others had philosophically elevated the principle, this was much more than a petty, personal desire for retribution. This was an act of rebellion, a vehement defense of personhood in an era when the state and the stampeding, faceless masses would crush the individual. Maybe the old banner from the American revolution would be more appropriate: Don't Tread on Me,illustrated with a crude, coiled snake embroidered beneath the words. The implication being I bite.

  Don't control me.

  Mr. Smith was out shopping. The mall in Danbury was a huge, gaudy affair, big enough to disappear into, with the added advantage of being across the state line. It was one of nine malls he rotated through for supplies. Not that these purchases should ring any alarm bells, but there was a certain pleasure intaking such precautions. It reminded him that he was a guerrilla, a secret army of one.

  He parked in the middle of the lot, locked the car, sniffed the May air. Sun still up, sky clear: a pretty nice evening. He decided he needed to get out more often.

  Most of the supplies could be bought at the home-building supply store, a sprawling hangar like building across the parking lot from the main shopping complex. The battery of his cordless drill seemed to be discharging too fast, and Mr. Smith had decided that a replacement was in order. Got to keep your infrastructure in top shape. Another bunch of eyelets, a dozen or so, stay ahead of the game there. He still had two spools of the line, so that could wait, but it might benice to get another box of gloves. Also some more of that deodorizing cleaner, the kind designed for pet smells, with enzymes that literally digested urine and other odorous fluids.

  The store contained a dazzling selection of sizes and brands of everything. And all of it so clean and well displayed. Do-it-yourselfers cruised the aisles with pushcarts groaning with two-by-fours, gasoline-poweredleaf-blowers, circular saws, sections of PVC, gallons of housepaint.Enjoy it, you sonsabitches, the puppeteer thought.God knows you've sacrificed everything for it.

  He brought his selections to the cashier. She was a pretty young woman who wore a plastic name badge that told impatient customers that she was in training, a way of explaining her slow and inept processing of their purchases, her hesitations and apologies. The puppeteer felt sorry for her as the line grew. When it was his turn, he paid in cash with exact change, for which she gave him a grateful smile. A pretty, dark-haired girl.

  Next, some more specialized purchases in the palatial main building of the mall. Sharper Image and Brookstone, delicious high-tech shops full of cunning electronic devices easily adaptable for other purposes. Then some basic components at Radio Shack, where the cashier asked for his phone number and he declined to give it, telling the guy he was on enough mailing lists already. Then Lechter's, which sold excellent cooking utensils, including a brand of knives of such good steel that they could be reground and honed to surgical sharpness. So few people nowadays knew the power of a good blade, how amazing a truly sharp tool could be. Of course, you had to know how to grind them properly, a once common skill now mostly lost among the general population. Americans, among so much else that they'd let slip, had forgotten the blades that the Vietcong used with such effectiveness, the fast work a smaller man with a razor-edged long knife could make of a big, heavily armed, and encumbered GI.

  He left the temple of commerce happily burdened himself, carrying several shopping bags full of things bought with honest greenbacks. At first he congratulated himself that it had all gone well. But then he ran into a hitch as he was trying to get out of the parking lot and had to wait in traffic snarled at the mall exit. A light was malfunctioning and there were some repairs in progress on the entrance ramp to Route7, so a cop was directing cars, wearing a clownish orange reflective vest and an orange plastic shower cap over his police hat. All the drivers were a little confused, their reflexes dulled by the anesthetic of shopping, slowed by this deviation from routine. The cop was having a hard time alone, really it was a job for two men. When the Mr. Smith started to cross into the intersection, the harried cop stuck out a white glove and shot him a wide-eyed glower. He waved his other hand like a scolding schoolmarm, side to side with one finger raised, and stepped into the path of Mr. Smith's car before turning to direct the cross-traffic. Sitting there, locked into the intersection like a beef steer crowded into a cattle chute, Mr. Smith felt the artery in his neck bulge, twist like a snake. Heat poured into his face. Blood pressure spiking, he could practically feel the hippo campus bloating at the base of his brain, convulsing like an exposed grub. The contempt and the arrogance of the cop's gestures. For a moment it occurred to him to teach a lesson to this cop, to watch from a distance and trail him home. Then he thought of accelerating the next phase with Number Four, things were almost ready anyway.

  But that was stupid. He deliberately shed a degree of heat, reminded himself of the need for caution. It was more than a personal safety issue, it was virtually national security. You didn't lose control, you took control. That's how you struck back. That's how you made the statement. That's how you made them pay, and that's how you gained ascendancy. Over yourself, over others, over life. This was to a large degree a metaphysical quest.

  Still, it was good that it didn't take too long for the cop to turn and beckon him to advance. The orange-capped blond head nodded reassuringly and almost apologetically, and the pressure backed off a few foot-pounds. Time to go home.

  The puppeteer used his remote to open the gate and then cruised up the long driveway. Mid-May, the place was beautiful in the sunset light, a little mysterious. The Smith house. Big oaks sheltered the grounds, last year's leaves thick on the forest floor among a low growth of myrtle. After the turn, the lawn and the rise to the house.

  The house was not large, but it was fine as a second residence for a single man, and with its double garage and the little wing he'd added in back, it had all the room he needed. A classic Westchester woods house that looked as if it had grown up out of the soil: steep, moss-stained roof, ivy-grown stone walls, massive chimney, little windows. Around here they called the style Rustic Tudor, but he always saw something Bavarian in it. A Black Forest fairy-tale house. It had been built long before the area became the upscale enclave it was now, and infact the land behind the house, down toward the stream, had been a garbage dump forty years earlier. That was in the era before environmental constraints and zoning and permitting. Now the old dump was long overgrown, a scrubby forest choked by kudzu and marked by the occasional rusted-out hulks of round-backed Studebakers and DeSotos. It made a handy place to bury the dogs and was crucial to the later phases of the conditioning process, a proving ground of sorts.

  He regretted that he had only three acres, but the size of the estates on either side, the old dump, and the highway dead zone not so far away gave him abundant privacy. You couldn't see any other houses from anywhere on his property, and from the front windows of the house you could see cars passing only during winter.

  He drove up to the garage and parked in front of the right-hand door. He took his purchases into the workshop and, after switching on the lights, began putting them away into cabinets and drawers. The electronics shop occupied its own corner of the big room, opposite the heavier machining equipment, and for now he set the scale he'd bought at Brookstone on the workbench there. The scale was a clever device that not only weighed you but measured your body-fat content by passing a weak electrical current into your flesh through the chrome plates you stood on, which were really electrodes. Having read the machine's technical spe
cs, he'd been delighted to find that the current it used was exactly what he'd calculated for the next direct neural-stimulus experiments and would save him time customizing components. He gave the scale an affectionate pat and looked forward to dismantling it later.

  When he was done, he went to the surgical room to check on the dogs. The two of them waited whimpering in their separate cages. A golden retriever and a German shepherd, both about two years old, adopted through ads in the Hartford advertising weekly. They were good dogs, still handsome despite the incongruous bald domes that capped their heads above their worried eyebrows. He'd shaved them yesterday and had rewarded them with treats for their good behavior. Now he spoke to them soothingly as he inserted the hose through the mesh and refilled their water bowls.

  Back in the main room, he cocked an ear toward the house and heard nothing, which suggested that things were still in order there. Then he took a seat at the workbench and opened the Times he'd picked up from a coin box at the mall, scanning it carefully and then refolding it. He looked over the Daily News and thefournal News just as carefully. Monday's article on the O'Connor murder had been disappointingly vague, and there was no follow-up today.

  When he was done with the news scan, he unfolded the cash-register receipts from the day's shopping and spread them out on the table, going over the figures. The one from Lechter's got his attention fast. He took out a calculator and tapped in the numbers to double-check. He'd been right the first time—they'd overcharged him. Son. Of A.Bitch. That big, oafish guy at the register, smiling insincerely while he rang up the charges and either fucked up or deliberately jacked the price five dollars.

  The artery writhed in his neck again. The top of his head felt too small to contain the pressure inside. The five dollars wasn't so important, it was the principle of the thing, the system grinding along andcontrolling him, maneuvering him to its advantage, bilking him. And, worst of all, he couldn't go back to the mall and make a scene, couldn't risk standing out or making a profile in any way. He had to be patient about these things, he reminded himself. But his impotence was enormously frustrating. He was caught, controlled, just one little puppet in a great big puppet show, and there was not a goddamned thing he could do about it.

  Except,he reminded himself. Except what he was already doing. Except the job at hand. When the tabloids had finally gotten wind of the links between the killings in New Jersey and then Manhattan, they'd called them the work of a "monster." Mr. Smith didn't really mind that, though he'd have preferred more acknowledgment of the insight and skill they'd required. On one level, yes, anyone who could do that kind of thing was a monster. But he was just doing as he'd been taught. He was doing what he'd been trained to do, made to do, the thing he was good at, the thing he'd been assured it was essential for him to do. If he was a monster, they had made him one, and it was only fair that they faced the consequences now.

  The thoughts ate at him, piranha in a feeding frenzy, a thousand small, savage bites, and his hands shook as he filed away the receipts. Despite his self-control he knew from experience the thoughts and the pressure wouldn't quit without the relief of some catharsis.

  Fortunately, he wasn't without recourse on that score.

  He turned off the garage lights, quietly unlocked the door to the kitchen, then slipped inside the dark house and shut the door soundlessly behind him. The shock value of a sudden appearance. Once he was inside, he crossed the kitchen and stood near the door to the living room. There was a little odor of mildew and urine, and the only light came from the digital clock in the microwave. He waited, then deliberately stomped his feet and banged a pot on the counter.

  In the following silence he was gratified to hear a quick shift and scrape from the dark room beyond, as if a small animal had withdrawn into a corner and now stood waiting. A palpable sense of fear and expectation.

  "I'm home," he announced. A stern, paternalistic voice. "I'm coming in." All he got for reply was another light shifting sound and some more cowering silence. It was very gratifying.

  12

  WEDNESDAY CAME UPWET, a light rain misting down from a low, pewter-colored sky. Mo didn't mind, it meant that he could work inside without looking through the windows at another beautiful spring day that he couldn't take the time to get out into. He settled into his chair, ignoring the banter of Estey and Paderewski across the room. A bunch of materials from the O'Connor murder had come through, including a summary of the legwork the White Plains PD and St. Pierre had done. St. Pierre was inexperienced, but the guy was a bundle of energy. Already he had interviewed the victim's sister in Poughkeepsie, the people at O'Connor's copy shop, and a woman he had recently started dating. His notes said O'Connor had been thirty-two, no kids, divorced two years ago with the ex now living in California. An avid bicycler and kayaker, amateur nature photographer. The girlfriend said they'd been dating for about six months, and both she and the sister had gone to pieces when St. Pierre had interviewed them. At Mo's suggestion, the white plains people and St. Pierre were keeping a close eye out for disagreements or altercations O'Connor might have had with people, anything that might have made him seem"controlling" and established him as a target for the killer. White Plains was still trying to reach the former wife in Sacramento, but everybody knew this one was not about a vengeful ex.

  Reading a life story summed up like this gave Mo a pang. Reduce any life to its outwardly visible facts, a pile of paper, and it'd seem generic, arbitrary data without a soul. Mo's own postmortem life summary would be pretty bleak. Between the paper and the meat thing left at a murder scene, it made you have to ask just what a life was. The answers suggested were not uplifting.

  Mo looked to get something more useful from the lab materials that had also come through. Angelo had performed the autopsy Tuesday afternoon, and his report was there. Time of death was very early Friday morning, meaning that O'Connor had been caught at home before work Thursday and the killer had used him for maybe eighteen hours. Angelo's notes said that after O'Connor had been suspended from the wall, he had been able to support his weight on his leg and arm cords, and he'd only strangled to death when his limbs could no longer keep tension off the neck cord. The close-up photos of wrist and knee ligature sites showed abrasion and directional bleeding that was consistent with him being alive for a time on the wall.

  The thought of a man straining to hold himself until his strength failed and he slowly choked, that was hard to take. Mo took a moment to shut his eyes and rub the bridge of his nose.

  The extensive bruising around ligature sites suggested that O'Connor had been forcibly manipulated for a long time. No sign of sexual assault, unusual for a ritualistic killer of this sort. Organ condition and muscle tone good, meaning that O'Connor had been fit and in good health, lending credence to Dr. Ingalls's claim that the killer would also be quite strong. Angelo had made incisions through the temple wounds and had provided both photos and cross-sectional drawings of them. Mo was no expert on old tools, but the size and shape of the wounds looked about right for a pair of antique ice tongs with sharpened points. Just like the tongs long since recovered from Ronald Parker.

  Angelo had provided a group of close-up photos of the ligature knots, which would provide the most telling comparisons to the original Howdy Doody killings. By this afternoon, when he went back to the FBI Manhattan field office with these materials, Mo would have some idea just how deep this shithole was. He couldn't tell without comparing them side by side, but looking at the knots now he had a sinking feeling. They jibed closely with what he remembered of the knots he'd glimpsed in Biedermann's files.

  And, yes, the handcuffs on O'Connor's wrists were the Flex-Cuf brand Special Agent Morris had identified on Parker's victims. Angelo had simply read the brand name and logo off the straps.

  Finally, there was a sampling of photos of the arranged objects found at O'Connor's house, clearly showing that several kinds of designs and patterns were repeated. The zigzag lines with objects in the angles, a s
tarburst of smaller objects around a larger, and soon. Some kind of arranging of victim and objects was not uncommon with serial murderers, and the exact nature of the arrangements could reveal a lot about the psychology of the perpetrator. A focus on the genitals of the victim would suggest a sex-derived psychopathology. Swastikas, crosses, or other symbols could provide clues to the perpetrator's cultural background. Use of flowers, facial covering, or concealment of wounds might represent symbolic burial and suggested that the perpetrator felt remorse or shame. In fact, the FBI's Behavioral Sciences Unit had put together an encyclopedic catalog of such arrangements, with exhaustive analysis of the psychological implications of each.

  These photos would also be interesting to compare with Biedermann's photos of Ronald Parker's arrangements. And, Mo reminded himself, with the arrangements and other details of the power station scene.

  By the time he'd finished reviewing the new materials, it was eleven-thirty. Estey had left the office. Paderewski had her feet up on her desk and was leafing through a magazine and listening to music on earphones as she took a coffee break. Mo had just decided it was time to do likewise when the door swung open and St. Pierre came in. He came over to Mo's desk and moved papers aside to make room to sit on it.

  "You got time for an update on the power station corpse?" St. Pierre gestured with the file folder he was carrying.

  "Show me," Mo said.

  "Forensic ID is working on two main avenues. On the odontology side, we got X-rays and photos of the teeth, and I've personally taken copies to every dentist in the county. Our tooth people say she had a grinding problem, excessive wear, and if she sought treatment, like one of those mouth guards you wear when you're sleeping, that might help speed up the dentists' matching her teeth with a patient." He tossed several photos on the desk, shots of upper and lower jaws from different perspectives. "On the jewelry, the earrings were nothing much, but the ring seemed unusual enough that it might have a history. So I've been taking photos of it to jewelers all overt he county, see if they've ever seen it, maybe sold it or done work on the setting." St. Pierre slipped two more photos out, gave them to Mo.