Puppets (14 page)

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, aren'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

M
R. 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 that
restrain the killing
urges
—
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 we
don'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. "Good
boyl
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.

"Yes, Daddy."

Better. "Say it three times."

"Yes, Daddy. Yes, Daddy. Yes, Daddy." Saying it, Four's eyes watered from fear. It was always odd to see an adult in this situation, to hear the words, but you had to do it, had to hearken all the way back to a subject's emotional foundations. And fathers were so often oppressors, weren't they.

"Good," he said, curt and authoritarian now as he looped the elbow knot and gave it a jerk that had to hurt. Skipping the neck cord for now, he gathered the last two lines and secured them. Once they were knotted, he tested each line in turn and found them satisfactory. Just enough slack for some movement.

"But of course, we humans are not animals, are we? We talk, we establish complex relationships, we have long memories of our lives, don't we? You can answer."

"Yes, Daddy." The subject looked sick now, weak, hunching naked and pale-skinned against the wall.

"Which means that simple behavioral conditioning is not enough, not for an animal as complicated as we are, is it? We need a subtler approach, too—a psychological approach. So to supplement the Pavlovian conditioning, we move on to the psychoanalytic model, which calls for us to establish
narratives
that describe our lives, especially our early lives. Because our experiences when we were children, even infants, shape the way we think and feel and behave now, as adults. Right? You can answer. And lift your right leg, too."

Number Four lifted the leg and stood, balancing with difficulty, crying, knowing the hurting parts were coming. "Yes. I mean, yes, Daddy."

"Put down the leg. Now raise the left. Good. Down. Good. Now your left arm—lift it and salute me. Good. Down. Good. Now your right arm, the same. Good. Now smile." They did this for a time, Mr. Smith picking up the tempo of his commands. "Good," Mr. Smith said, and threw the knuckleball: "Now tell me—do you hate me?"

Number Four had behaved well, had learned all this so quickly, but now hesitated. This part was tricky, they were never sure about the emotional terrain.

"Answer me." Mr. Smith picked up the tongs and was gratified to see the subject's eyes widen. The nostrils flared, a sure sign of a hormonal state of alarm. The temple wounds were still oozing, the memory of that pain would be fresh. "Don't you hate Daddy now? Don't you wish I would go away? Don't you wish you could move without me telling you? You can answer. Don't you want to hurt me? You
better
answer." Letting the anger come into his voice.

Tremblingly, quietly: "Yes. Yes, Daddy."

Too scared, not enough anger there yet. "What don't you like? What's the thing about Daddy you hate the most?"

"Control," the subject croaked."Daddy's control."

"Control. Very good. It's imperative that you understand, deeply understand, how important this is, why the issue of
control
is so important. What is control, really? The fact is, the desire for control underlies our every move, from our basest self-interested activities to our highest aspirations. I'll bet you don't think so, but it's true. What's 'democracy'? It's about
control,
isn't it—people rejecting the control of the few and demanding control of their own lives. What's'religion,' what's 'prayer'? A passive-aggressive attempt to control what God does—'Be nice tome because I'm being subservient and grateful and properly observant,' or 'Please let me live or be healthy or get rich'!" What's 'art'? An attempt to impose order on chaos, to control physical media, and to manipulate the emotional responses of other people! Right? You see how important this is?"

Four nodded, nervous about where this was going. Mr. Smith thought about it himself, hoping that the subject was ready for this."So our lives, human history, it's all about people vying for
control.
And control can be a cruel weapon, can't it. To get what you want from others. A way to victimize others."

Against his will, he felt himself succumbing to his own rhetoric. It was all true. Abruptly he felt himself on the verge of tears. A knot in his throat choked him as he tried to talk. "Look at me, my life. I was controlled from the time I was a young man. I was bright and promising,
because
I was so bright and promising and idealistic,
that's
why they had to control me. To use me. They used my best attributes to control me—my desire to serve my country, my desire to help heal my fellowman, my intelligence and skill. They took all those good things and turned me into a monster—because
they
needed a monster! So look what I've become! A whole life spent in secrecy and intrigue, a whole
life
undercover,
quarantined
from the rest of the human race as if I had some kind of
diseasel
Could I get married? Could I have kids? No—nothing! I've got
no
one, no relatives or loved ones. My memories? An archive of horrors! And on top of that, on top of
all that,
they want to catch me and kill me. There are
teams
of people with no other goal than to destroy me! And that's why we have to make a statement, don't we. Pitiful as it is, hopeless as it is, we have to make our solitary statement of defiance, don't we? Just you and me."