Puppets (18 page)

25

B
UT IT REALLY WAS pretty simple. The best time, Mo had decided, would be Thursday, when they'd scheduled another "Pinocchio killer" task force meeting at the FBI offices—information sharing on the Carolyn Rappaport murder. There'd be a good crowd, and all Rebecca had to do was excuse herself from the conference room for five minutes and take a glance at Biedermann's personal calendar. She had only to ascertain where he'd been on the dates that Daniel O'Connor and Carolyn Rappaport were killed. Simple.

Still, he'd left her apartment with the sense that he'd blown it. She'd cooled, she'd gotten stiff and formal. Keeping her distance from men who asked her to do dangerous things. He couldn't blame her. He'd been an idiot to suggest it. On the other hand, once he had, he couldn't dissuade her from going through with it. She had a lot of . . . what would they call it in the Midwest? Pluck.

In any case, the plan left the first part of the week to make progress with the legwork. Monday began with a meeting with Mike St. Pierre, mainly to discuss Irene Bushnell, the power-station victim. Regardless of the other complications of the puppet murders, Mo felt, they had to build the case on the reliable bedrock of traditional criminology, forensic science, and logical deduction. Because, human cruise missile or not, Pinocchio was a flesh-and-blood man who had somehow come into Irene's physical proximity and gained control of her. And given that she had died at the power station, a place she was unlikely to spontaneously visit, at a time when her husband was driving his truck in Nebraska, Mo was willing to bet she'd had repeated contacts with the killer—enough for him to know something about her. Eventually, if you looked closely enough, if you played through the film of her last days, you'd see Pinocchio enter the frame, make contact.

And St. Pierre was doing a tremendous job of connecting dots. By eleven o'clock, he had called all the people Irene Bushnell had worked for and had made up charts depicting every household's members, her work schedule, and her other contacts within the community. He began setting up the interviews and other background work that might help them identify Irene's supposed lover or murderer or both. Mo was grateful to have a methodical, focused young investigator doing this kind of homework, and he told St. Pierre so. Mike tried to conceal how much the praise meant to him.

St. Pierre had gone to seed since the baby came. When Mo commented on it, he explained, "No sleep. Lilly and I got to get up five times a night." His eyes were tired, but there was a glow in them, too, which Mo assumed had to do with his new fatherhood. Mo had been given to understand that a nesting instinct took over when you had a kid, you felt very close to your wife, priorities shifted, and so on. The tired but happy mammals. When Mike had come in this morning, Paderewski had commented on the puke stains on his shirt, and St. Pierre had looked proud rather than embarrassed. And yet he was still cranking out this great work.

They split up and spent the afternoon talking to the clients Irene had been working for. By the end of the day, Mo had slogged through three go-nowhere, uncomfortable interviews: People got scared and tightened up when murder struck so close. The first client was a frazzled, red-haired mom of three carrot-topped kids in a massively ostentatious house in Briarcliff Manor, for whom Irene had cleaned Tuesday and Friday mornings. Among other details, she told him that she and the kids had always been there when Irene was, the husband always at work in the city. Scratch the possibility that hubby had been Irene's secret flame.

The second client was a middle-aged couple, the Tomlinsons, who lived in an older house in downtown Ossining. They both worked in banking, the husband usually telecommuting because he was mobility-impaired, a member of the polio generation of the fifties and mostly wheelchair-bound. Without kids or pets, they didn't need cleaning often, so Irene worked there for just four hours every Monday, leaving around one o'clock for another of her jobs. They knew nothing about Irene's life. Mo found them dour and suspicious, and their house struck him as oppressively, overly tidy. They'd gone with a new cleaning company since Irene's disappearance.

The last client was a single woman in her early forties, a lady exec at a hardware distributorship, and her aged mother. Neither knew anything about Irene's personal life, and they seemed to resent Mo's assumption that they might.

A dead-end day. Mo thought of driving into the city to see Rebecca but then doubted that he'd be a welcome visitor. Back to Carla's mom's house. He decided he'd call Rebecca later, see how she was doing with some of the research she was planning to do on U.S. military psychological experiments.

The thought occurred to him: It would be nice, someday, to have a more cheerful subject to discuss with her, a better excuse to call her.

Tuesday morning, he got a call from Flannery's secretary: The DA expected him at one o'clock for an update on the Pinocchio killer. Another command appearance, back by popular demand. Mo almost told the secretary that Flannery could go fuck himself, Big Willie or no, but then remembered his need to keep Flannery allied as a counterbalance to Biedermann. He spent the morning at his desk, running through some paperwork while St. Pierre sat with the phone pressed against his head. The tedium side of the job.

When Mo arrived at the DA's office, Flannery was at his desk, dressed in a sharp pinstripe suit that emphasized his massive shoulders. The teddy-bear charm was a bit thin today, Mo decided. Flannery looked preoccupied as he waved Mo to a chair and sat tapping the desk with his pen.

"How're you doing, Detective?" he asked.

"More or less adequate. You?"

"Task force meeting day after tomorrow. I'll be there myself. I want to make sure I'm up to speed on the case. Thought you and I should touch base."

This was predictable, Mo thought. The DA would be making his first appearance on the new task force, with an audience of other self-important guys to impress. He'd want to bring up some nuanced points to show how on top of things he was, project the proper air of authority. Mo summarized events since he'd seen him last: the complete lack of progress on Daniel O'Connor's murder, the precious few leads on Irene Bushnell's murder, nothing solid on the Carolyn Rappaport case other than the indications of the killer's increasing psychological imbalance.

Flannery's frown deepened by degrees, and at last he held up a hand. "You think I'm a pretty complete bimbo, don't you? Another asshole politico with no brains, no integrity, no commitments other than making himself look good. A guy whose best talent is spotting necks to step on on his climb to success. Have I got that about right?"

Mo did a double take, getting a sour grin from Flannery.

"Hey, I'm telepathic!" Flannery said acidly. He stood, went to his window, looked out over the forest of construction cranes across the plaza. The daylight reflected off his bald dome. "Look, Mo—I can call you Mo, right?—you can think whatever you like about me personally, I'm an asshole, whatever. Fine. But I want to tell you something. Authority isn't just
handed
to anybody. Being the big guy, able to get the big jobs done, requires that people around you
believe
you're the big guy. Yeah, my job is part theater. So, yeah, in the interests of earning some clout, I like to look good. I like to have some extra strings to pull to get things done. And, yeah, in the interests of the public's sense of security and well-being, I like to
look
like I know what I'm doing, like I'm confident about positive outcomes. No question." Flannery turned back from the window, came to stand in front of his desk. His blue eyes bored into Mo's, and he was actually breathing hard with the intensity of feeling. "But just remember, whatever your opinion, it is
not
about
me. It is about getting
the job done!"

Flannery hurled the last words at Mo and then,
wham!,
brought a meaty fist down on, the desk. The desktop was a solid slab of mahogany, but the pen set and phone jumped half an inch.

The blow startled Mo, but he managed not to move, not even to blink. "So it's lonely at the top?"

Flannery just stared at him, shaking his head sadly. "Cool customer, huh? Well, that's good, because this is a shit heap, isn't it, and the pressure's about to go up. Carolyn Rappaport was the daughter of the school superintendent. I know the Rappaports socially, they've communicated with me directly about their daughter's murder. People feel very
threatened
when this kind of thing happens to the daughters of prominent citizens, 'Mo.'"

"We're doing everything—"

" 'Everything'? My understanding is, Carolyn Rappaport was killed Friday night. You got out there Saturday. When did I hear about it? Monday. When were you thinking you might get around to telling me about it? How
ready
do you think I sounded when Bill Rappaport called me yesterday? How
in charge
did I sound?" Flannery had gotten cranked up again, but then caught himself and brought it under control. He leaned back against his desk and folded his arms. "Any other little details you haven't gotten around to telling me?"

There was a lot to tell somebody, an ocean of complications, but Mo needed time to think about how to go about it. Whether telling Flannery was the right place to start. "I don't think so," he said.

Flannery's face brightened. "Oh. I see. Like you didn't get anything worthwhile from consulting with the psychologist, what's her name, on a profile for this creep? Not a
crumb
of insight you could share with the district attorney? And you didn't learn anything from Erik Biedermann about where the FBI is going with this? After he put on his three-ring circus at the power station last Friday?"

Flannery was showing him that he was keeping tabs on the investigation, on Mo personally, and Mo almost asked who was reporting to him. But he was sick of the game. He stood up and went to lean against the desk himself. He was still a little shorter, but at least they were side by side, it wasn't so uneven. Flannery's leathery neck wrinkled as he turned his head. Up this close, Mo saw other things in his face beside the bearish charm. The wrinkles on his forehead and around his eyes told of cunning and striving, but beneath that was anxiety, even sadness. Maybe the DA did have an agenda beyond self-aggrandizement, maybe even something like the personal crusade to combat evil that motivated many cops. Including Mo Ford. In which case, not unlike Mo, he daily faced an endless, losing battle.

Against his better judgment, Mo felt for the guy, and he decided against making a smart-ass comeback. Instead he said, "Look, I'll send you copies of my notes. But I don't have time for this bullshit. There are a lot of possible leads, most of them will prove to be dead ends, I can't tell you anything substantive other than what I already told you. Biedermann doesn't tell me anything, you'll have to talk to him directly if you want more. If there are nuances you're missing, that's what these task-force meetings are about. We'll all know more on Thursday."

Flannery nodded at that. "Okay." He checked his watch with a weary gesture, then got off the desk and went around to sit in his chair again. He jotted a number on a scrap of paper and shoved it across to Mo. "Okay, Detective. This is my personal cell phone number, it's always with me. What you're gonna do is, right here while I'm watching, take out your cell phone and peck that sucker into your phone's memory. So you've got
one button
to push to
call me
thefuck up
when there are developments! So you have no goddamned excuses."

Flannery watched expectantly, his eyes hard. Playing the big boss. Mo looked at him for a moment, then decided what the hell. He took out his Nokia and programmed in Flannery's cell number.

A glint of satisfaction flitted over Flannery's face, the guy getting his jollies from pushing Mo around. "Very good. Then I'll see you Thursday. And thank you for your time."

Mo was at the door when the DA called to him again. "Oh. Just so you know. A heads-up about, what'd you guys call him, Big Willie."

Mo turned to see Flannery with a big grin on his face. It gave him shock.

"I got a call from the attorney for Willard's family. Turns out he's got a rich uncle in Philadelphia. They're considering a wrongful-death civil suit against you personally. And they're urging me to press criminal charges as well."

Terrific,
Mo was thinking. On top of everything else, a tangle of legal hassles and expenses. Court appearances, the other side's calculated vilification of him. Win or lose, the harrying of months of litigation. As if his life weren't enough of a mess. As if Rebecca wouldn't have enough doubts about getting together with a guy like him.

"So what'd you tell them?" he croaked.

Flannery was really enjoying this. "I told them I was reviewing the incident and considering the possibility of criminal charges. But just between you and me and the wall, I'm not inclined in that direction. At this juncture, anyway."

Flannery's mouth grinned. Mo nodded to show he'd heard what he intended—another reminder about Mo's obligation to do his bidding, about who was in charge.