Puppets

by Daniel Hecht

  They followed her back through the warehouse between towering stacks of foams and wraps. Other employees looked at them curiously, this guy in a dark suit with cop stamped into his forehead, and this big, gorgeous blonde, following the short, sad figure of Mrs. Drysdale. Back in the middle of the building, she stopped at the first of a row of huge foam blocks, each the size of a city bus. The row stretched for half a block.

  "These're the buns," she explained. She been carrying a handheld computer inventory device and now switched it on. "They're going to the band saw later, I gotta keep track of the cutting lots." They did look like gigantic to aves of bread, except that they were made of flesh-toned plastic, Caucasian with an uneven tan. Mo prodded the nearest bun and yanked his hand back when he found that the surface was a tough hide that felt just about like human skin. Mrs. Drysdale found a tag stapled to the bun and pecked listlessly at her computer.

  "Mrs. Drysdale," Mo began, "Detective St. Pierre mentioned several points that came up when he spoke to you earlier, and I felt we should follow up on them immediately. I'm sorry to have to discuss details that may be difficult for you, but the odd fact you tell us may be the one that allows us to catch Irene's killer. And we very much want to catch him."

  Mrs. Drysdale walked on toward the next bun, her frumpy back to Mo and Rebecca as they followed her. She looked alone and lost between the fleshy loaves.

  When she stopped again and began pecking at her computer, Mo continued, "You suggested that Irene may have had a, uh, a relationship with someone."

  "Her and Byron," Mrs. Drysdale said quietly. "They would never settle down. I told Irene, you get married it's supposed to mean something. Just out of high school, it's okay you shop around, you flirt, you get your guy jealous, maybe guys fight over you, that feels good. But you're twenty-seven, you can't live in a soap opera." She slapped the computer with the flat of her hand. "This darned thing. I hate these things. Never comes out right." She scrabbled her fingers over the keyboard and slapped it again, her face puckering.

  "Why did you think Irene was having an affair recently?"Rebecca asked softly. "What did she say that made you think that?"

  Mrs. Drysdale began the walk to the next bun, and they followed. On the way, a pair of teenaged employees came buzzing around a corner in a golf cart, hot-rodding at all of eight miles an hour. They saw Mrs. Drysdale and slowed, sobered up, drove away. Word of her grief had traveled fast among the Quality Plastics staff.

  Mrs. Drysdale would probably have walked the whole length of the warehouse without saying anything, but Rebecca caught up with her. She took her arm gently, steered her toward a thigh-high slab of foam, sat her on it."This is a very difficult time for you. It's a time when you need to take care of yourself. Why don't you rest here, talk to us if you can? Sometimes it helps to talk about a loved one you've lost." Mrs. Drysdale was quietly crying, and Rebecca began stroking her forehead. Mo was impressed at how easily it came to her: reaching out, comforting, taking care. Rebecca crouched in front of her, one hand on Mrs. Drysdale's thigh. Good body language for a non adversarial interrogation, Mo realized, getting below the subject's height so as not to be imposing, giving her complete attention, a posture that was consoling but that also compelled a response.

  Mrs. Drysdale slumped, completely out of gas. "She asked me questions.'Mom, what if I had an affair with a guy?' It was something she wanted to talk about. First time I told her, T don't want to hear about this, you know how I feel.' Then a week later she's asking, 'When Dad was alive, did you ever fool around with another guy?' 'You think if By does something with somebody else, it's okay if I do?' Things like that."

  "Did she ever say anything that would suggest who the man was? How she met him, or where?"

  " 'Mom, did you ever think what it would be like to have a guy with some money?' " Mrs. Drysdale remembered. " 'Do you think I should have my hair redone?' She was thinking maybe a Princess Di cut, make her look kind of upper class. So I don't think it's one of the irregular friends."

  "That's excellent. That's just what we're looking for," Rebecca prompted."You're doing fine."

  So whoever Irene Bushnell's secret flame had been, Mo was thinking, she'd been conscious of the marketability factor. Knew she was reaching up.

  Mrs. Drysdale was responding well to Rebecca's encouragement. "That made me think maybe it was somebody she worked for. And I thought that would be a bad idea."

  "Tell us about that."

  "I don't know anything. She cleans. . . cleaned houses, you got to have some money to have someone in to clean, maybe it was one of the people she worked for. I don't know."

  "Would Byron know? Would they have talked about it if she were in love with someone else?"

  Mrs. Drysdale scowled. "Never."Then her eyebrows tilted up in the middle again, hopelessness."Maybe the lady who runs The Gleam Team, but Irene wouldn't've said anything to her, she'd be afraid of losing the job."

  They gave her some time, but she didn't say any more. She fidgeted listlessly with her inventory computer. With the foam on all sides, they sat in a quiet that felt like clogged ears.

  Mo broke the silence. "You told Detective St. Pierre that Irene had an interest in the Howdy Doody murders. How did you know she did?"

  "She saw that TV thing, Unsolved Mysteries, before they caught him, we watched it together. She thought it was horrible, him tying people up with fishline. Couple of times, we'd talk and she'd mention it. She knew everything the papers wrote about it, how many people died, that stuff."

  "Did she ever suggest why the case particularly interested her? Was she interested in other sensational murders or other news events?"

  Mrs. Drysdale just shook her head."Sometimes. Mainly just Princess Di—the car crash. She bought a commemorative plate."

  Rebecca took a turn, probing gently, trying to find the trigger for Mrs. Drysdale's memory. But nothing came. She sat collapsed in on herself on the sagging foam slab. After a while a buzzer went off somewhere and she got up, dusting foam crumbs off her jeans.

  "I should a been done here, they got to get these to the band saw." She began her lonely walk down the aisle of buns, paused at the next, pecked at her computer, slapped it in frustration, wiped her eyes. Rebecca looked after her with sympathy, caught Mo's eye. He nodded. This interview was over.

  As soon as they were back in the car, she asked, "So?"

  "So let'shave that dinner," Mo said.

  "Can't tonight. I've got a conference call scheduled with two psychologists from Stanford, the kind of thing that could go on and on. I meant, so what did you get from Mrs. Drysdale?"

  He gave up, got to business."I'd say, two things. One, the lover. Maybe Irene was having a fling with the copycat, he decided to kill her, he set it upon some pretext so they went to the power station for a tryst. Two, the possibility of the connection to her job. She knew a little about Howdy Doody—maybe she was cleaning, found some paraphernalia she thought was suspicious, he found out and had to kill her."

  "Neither of which scenario fits the Howdy Doody motivational profile a tall."

  "Yeah, but neither does the power station. You said yourself something went very wrong."

  "True." Rebecca thought about that, looking troubled, staring through the windshield at nothing in particular.

  Mo caught the same mood. There could also be no connection at all between Irene Bushnell's murder and her job or her hypothetical affair. And too much was unexplained, the whole copycat problem was far too complex. Why imitate Howdy Doody? With Irene, maybe to throw the police off. But then, what, the guy learns he likes killing that exact way and randomly selects and kills Daniel O'Connor? Besides, how does he know the Howdy Doody weed-whacker line, the knots, the other details?

  They drove for a time without talking. After a while, he said, "You were very good with her. I admired your technique. I also appreciated your sympathy for her."

  "I was just going to say the same thing to you." Rebecca smiled. "You're a paradoxical person, a
ren't you?"

  Mo shrugged. He could feel himself falling toward her. It had an oddly inevitable feel. The comfortable feel of their silences. The pleasure he took in the sight of her when he glanced over. The sense of her being always right there, smart, observant. And yet completely unpretentious. When he'd first felt the tug, he'd questioned whether it was just his being lonely and horny and on the rebound, one of those. More and more this was feeling like something bigger. You had an instinct about that, you had to trust it. It would always surprise you, guaranteed it would catch you off-balance. He'd never quite felt this way with Carla, with her it had always been trying, three years of fishing for the feeling but never really getting it. Eventually coming to care about her deeply, and, yes, that was one kind of love, and he'd been willing to try to make that enough. Maybe he was nuts, needy, whatever, but this felt completely different. This felt like the needle on the compass swinging around to lock on magnetic north. No, it was like two gears meshing and beginning to turn together. No, it was . . .

  He shook his head, surprised at how far gone he felt.

  20

  MR. SMITH WAS WORKING on the dogs. He had been looking forward to this all week, but now he felt a little tired, one of the drawbacks of living in two places and having, really, two jobs. The day job was necessary in more ways than one, but this was his real work, his real avocation. He took a deep breath, enjoying the familiar alcohol scent, and rallied.

  He had never ceased to be amazed by the fact that the brain didn't have any sensory nerves in it. To avoid surface pain, he'd injected the German shepherd with a local anesthetic, a shallow subdermal shot just above and behind each eye. Now the dog was strapped flat to the stainless surgery table, looking up at him with soulful brown eyes as he drilled, wide awake but probably feeling almost nothing. There was a little blood, but he'd calculated bone depth very carefully before setting the stop on the bit, and he was confident the brain itself was untouched. He was good at this.

  "Atta boy," he said encouragingly as he removed the bit from the second hole. "Good dog." The dog looked at his face for cues. Mr. Smith was sure he'd have wagged his tail if he'd been able to move it. Friendly bugger.

  The next step was much trickier: inserting the blades at the right angle and to just the depth needed. He didn't have cranial imaging capacity on the premises, and the canine cranial anatomy was very different from the human head's. But he'd taken the shepherd to a country veterinarian in Massachusetts, telling the doc that his dog had been hit by a car, just his head, seemed all right but could we get a couple of X-rays?The vet had been glad to comply, and Mr. Smith had asked if he could take the films home, just in case something came up later he could give them to his regular vet. He repeated the same transaction with the golden retriever at a veterinarian in Pennsylvania:"I'm visiting from out of state, and my dog just got hit—" He'd paid in cash, of course.

  The end result was good films of both dogs' heads, lateral and dorsal views, and as he worked on the shepherd, he referred frequently to the X-rays, displayed in an illuminated viewer. Not as good as CT scans but not bad under the circumstances. In Vietnam, he had often worked with less.

  Mr. Smith had made the blades himself, regrinding some fine paring knives he'd bought, leaving a thin shaft five inches long and only an eighth of an inch wide, quite rigid, surgically sharp at the end. He set his angle with an old medical protractor, felt the first contact with the surface of the brain, and tapped the back of the handle until the blade had sunk to a depth mark he'd made in advance. No real resistance, just soft stuff. Mr. Smith thought,And that's all that doggy friendliness is, all that mammalian bonding, all that trust, all the things thatrestrain the killingurges—just a quarter inch of soft, wet, pink stuff. Sad, really. One might have wished those things were made of a more durable substance.

  A tremor shook the immobilized body, but still the shepherd stared up at him with those watery, soulful eyes. Mr. Smith withdrew the blade, set a slightly different angle, repeated the procedure. This time the eyes seemed togo blank for a few seconds, almost as if when the neural circuits were severed some part of the animal's consciousness disappeared. Blood welled out of the wound, which Mr. Smith dabbed away before he did the other side.

  "Good boy," he said a minute later. "Good boy. All done."

  The dog watched him, the eyes different now, as if it were thinking about something else, something remote and vaguely troubling. Sometimes this gave Mr. Smith a pang, seeing that mysterious thing go away from the eyes, human or canine.The most elegant and important aspect of a being, dog or man, he thought, and yet wedon't even have a name for it.

  He closed the wounds with a few swift sutures and wiped away the blood. Then it was time to put the dog back into his cage. A couple of days for recovery, then on with the conditioning phase. This time it would be a differential experiment, with the German shepherd serving as the control and the golden retriever receiving the implanted electrodes. He'd compare their progress, the speed at which they became conditioned, the durability of conditioning afterward, the ease of manipulation. Very exciting.

  He released the straps, leaving the head restraints until last. The little buggers could be tricky at this stage. When the last belt was removed, the dog drew his legs close to his body but still lay there, looking disoriented. Mr. Smith put his arms around the barrel chest and lifted the shepherd to its feet on the table, a little worried that he'd miscalculated, cut a motor circuit. But the dog stood on its own, shaky at first and then gaining strength. Mr. Smith watched its brown eyes, the preoccupied distance punctuated by erratic darker glints and shadows, primal urges and emotions flitting and fading. Like sharks just below the surface of the night sea, he thought, there, gone, dark on dark.

  "Okay,champ," he said. "Time for bed." He lifted the dog, feeling the tremors in its big body, and carried it to the open door of its cage. It stepped into the wire mesh box and turned around and looked at him vaguely and then suddenly lunged at his face with a throaty snarl. Mr. Smith reared away just too late, the long canines ripped into his neck just above the shoulder before he reflexively clubbed the muzzle with the side of his arm. The dog's bald head smashed against the metal door frame, and before it could recover, Mr. Smith slammed the door shut. The shepherd made one more lunge against the mesh with that same gargling primal growl. Mr. Smith put his hand to his torn shirt and looked at the blood on his fingers. His heart was pounding, his whole body ringing with adrenaline. Jesus, that was fast. Ouch. It was amazing how their reflexes actually improved when the neural inhibitory mechanisms were removed.

  The thought pleased him, and he smiled at the dog, who was still shivering buf calmer now, looking rather baffled. "Goodboyl That's my good boy,"Mr. Smith said approvingly. "What a good dog!"

  Several hours later, the wound disinfected and bandaged, he felt a flash of gratitude to the shepherd. The bandage was irritating right there, just below his collar on the right side, but it was only a shallow surface slash about an inch long. And that adrenaline rush had awakened him completely, swept away the cobwebs. Here it was the middle of the night and he was still going strong.

  He reeled a length of cord off the spool and clipped it with a wire cutter, moving with deliberation so that the subject could observe the details. The subject, Number Four, was already bound by six lengths of trimmer line and knew the feeling of restraint, the not-so-subtle bite of the cord's serrations as they sank into the skin. He had told Number Four to be quiet, not to utter a single sound until told to do so. Once all the cords were tied, he would do some lecturing, it was time for some context. The biggest advantage in conditioning humans as opposed to dogs: They could receive verbal communication.

  They also had good imaginations. They could imagine future or threatened discomforts.

  Mr. Smith held the end of the line close to the subject's face and demonstrated the knot again. "The basic Pavlovian model of conditioning is very simple," Mr. Smith explained. "The organism, in this case you, has
several basic biological programs, and behavioral conditioning exploits those to reinforce or discourage specific behaviors. Avoiding pain is a biggie, isn't it?" He snugged the loops of the knot and looked at the subject. "You can answer. Avoiding pain is an important motivation, isn't it?"

  "Yes." A shaky voice.

  "Really, really important?"

  "Yes—"

  "Very good. You do what's expected, you don't get pain. You don't do what you're supposed to, and you get hurt. Very simple. What's another motivation?"

  "Getting reward," the subject mumbled.

  Mr. Smith nodded approvingly. He gestured for Number Four to raise the left arm and was pleased to have immediate compliance. Then he slipped the looped end of the cord over the wrist, drawing it tight and tighter and watching the face until he saw the first twitches of pain there. The wrist was badly abraded from earlier, and the line cut into bloody tatters of skin.

  "Good. And reward can be as simple as the cessation of punishment or the providing of pleasure or wants or needs. For us humans, punishment or reward can be simply physical, but it can also be emotional—psychological. For example, would my approval of you constitute a reward? Make you feel good? Encourage a specific behavior?"

  Number Four hesitated, which suddenly infuriated Mr. Smith. He thought for an instant of doing something drastic, but he got himself under control quickly and decided to show his disapproval with just his body language, yanking lengths of cord off the spool with vehement gestures. Test subjects should be responsive to such nuances.

  He was glad to see that the subject noticed, looked more frightened."Yes!"

  " 'Yes' who?"Mr. Smith said nastily. He would push his control here, make it suffocating, not leave any room at all.