Puppets (25 page)

At the end of the hall, they went through another door and into the public section of the building. It was a carpeted lobby with branching hallways, dimly lit but with tasteful decor and good ventilation. In the huge solarium cage to their right, two massive, torpid crocodiles lay like fallen tree trunks in a shallow pool. Then they turned down a narrower corridor and the driver handed the box over to Annette, who disappeared into another service door. Zejek led them down a row of glass cubicles and finally paused in front of one large cage. The driver took up a position thirty feet farther down, looking suddenly very alert. On duty.

It took Mo a moment to see the snake. Brown and black, irregular diamonds mottled the big body and camouflaged it well against the artificial rocks and dead tree limbs. Then he spotted a second snake in the shadows under an overhang. This one was even larger, thicker in the body than Mo's thigh.

Zelek pointed them out.
"Python reticulatus.
The largest of the Serpentes. The big one is Samantha, perhaps the largest snake in captivity, twenty-seven feet long and two hundred sixty pounds. I have an affection for the family Boidae, the constrictors. They're expensive to keep up, and the Zoo receives a lot of financial support from our little society. Plus, Annette, bless her soul, is as enamored of the Boidae as I am. Which is why I'm allowed to help out with their feedings."

The snakes weren't moving. They could have been fake, made out of the same plaster as the rocks.
A quality of stillness only a cold-blooded
animal can manage,
Mo thought.

"But I didn't answer your question," Zelek went on. He continued staring into the cage as if he couldn't take his eyes off the snakes. "What do we want you to do? Well, just what Erik told you. Help us with the forensic end of it, by all means continue your excellent work, but don't go chasing after big game. The proper authorities—that is myself, Erik, and our team—are fully informed. You and Dr. Ingalls can rest your consciences on that score."

From behind the cage came an echoing metallic
clank.
The big pythons didn't budge, but in the next cage to the right a smaller snake began to ooze slowly along a dead tree limb.

Zelek noticed, too, and said, "That's our friend
Python boeleni.
Also a fine specimen. He's smart—he knows it's his feeding time, too."

Another series of metallic sounds from backstage, and now there was activity in many of the cages, silent glidings and shiftings. Zelek acknowledged the huge mud-brown snake to their left: "But it's not anaconda's turn. That's next week."

"What about," Mo said, "when we come up with things that don't make sense? Or that we don't know whether you're onto them or not?"

"They don't feed very often," Zelek explained. He raised his chin to point out the hatch that had opened at the top of the python cage. A metal basket appeared in the opening, with a pair of plump white rabbits moving fitfully inside. "Only about once every two weeks.
Reticulata
have slow metabolisms, and though they do crush the skeletons fairly well before ingesting, they eat their prey whole. So they take a long time to digest their dinner." Zelek had been watching the rabbits descend with keen appreciation in his alien eyes. "To answer your question, all you have to do is come to Erik with any inquiries or concerns. Not to anyone else, please, you'll only jeopardize our mission. But, again, that said, I hope you and Dr. Ingalls will leave the big picture to us. We're
very
familiar with it. We're almost done.
The last one, Detective!
Let it be."

Mo thought about it. "And if we don't?"

"They're always fed after hours," Zelek continued, "because the general public . . . well, it offends some people. Children in particular tend to get upset. Not good for the zoo's public relations or fund-raising for the Lepidosaura." Zelek laughed at his own understatement, a small, warm chuckle. "But it's just nature. It's the larger design of things, ancient, beautiful in its symmetry. It's just the food chain."

The rabbits got dumped as the cage neared the fake-rock floor of the cage, and they stood uncertainly near each other, sniffing and staring with round, pink eyes. Just pet store bunnies probably left over from the Easter sales season. They looked afraid to budge. Mo was thinking,
Their genes know the scent of the ancient enemy.

And then first one and then the other python began to move, just a lateral tick of the big heads at first, and then the slowest of slow adjustments of head and body. And then the hypnotizingly slow pour of the checkered bodies along the contours of the rocks. Straightening out of her coils, the big one was unbelievably long. The rabbits began leaping against the side of the cage, against the glass, up the rocks, in and out of the pool, up the glass again. Scrabbling, falling, leaping again.

"My point," Zelek said, "is just that you have done fine work, the proper authorities are in charge. I know this whole affair is probably upsetting to you and Dr. Ingalls. But I hope that after our talk today, you can put your minds at ease." He watched the cage with satisfaction for another moment, then said, "Their slow movements are actually quite deceptive. When they need to be, they're lightning quick. Once they scent their prey, it's all over quite fast."

32

O
N TUESDAY MORNING, Rebecca called to thank Mo for the evening of bowling and to say she'd been able to arrange access to Ronald Parker on Thursday at the psychiatric facility at Rikers Island. That was good, because the rest of the case appeared to be flatlining. He and St. Pierre hadn't come up with any useful leads on Irene Bushnell's possible lover and had started to look to the other murders for progress. But there wasn't any. Carolyn Rappaport had been killed by somebody who left no trace of himself other than his genetic material, useful for convicting but not for locating him. The O'Connor case had even less going for it.

After work, Mo thought about maybe going in to see Rebecca but then felt too out of control, too fucked-up. He was still processing the events of the last few days. Biedermann's revelation that he was the cleanup man, not the killer, had at first calmed his immediate fears. But then the session with Zelek, that was a real picnic. The alien hadn't uttered a single threatening word. But the image of the rabbits being crushed in the relentless coils, and then the endlessly stretching snake mouths—that was going to stay with him for a while. Mo didn't know which chilled him more, the idea that Zelek had deliberately scripted the scene or that the guy was truly oblivious to how grotesque it had been.

The visit to Mudda Raymon had stayed with him, too, disturbing him to the extent that he almost wanted to go back there and grill Carla about what she had told the old woman. Maybe even have another session with the mudda. But that was getting superstitious, losing his objectivity.

Bottom line, he didn't want Rebecca to see him like this, shaky and off-balance. Not until they knew each other better, not until whatever they were doing was stronger.

On the way home he stopped at a Burger King on the strip and sat in his hot car, stuffing down a Whopper as he watched the seagulls wheeling over the parking lots, flashing brilliant pink-orange in the light of the lowering sun. He stared suspiciously at the drivers of every car that came through the lot. Any one of them could be the killer, Mo might have seen him every day for years. That was the thing about serial killers, their ongoing secret presence among ordinary people. The masquerade. Ponder that one too much, it could bring you down.

Without thinking about what he was going to do, he got out and walked across the parking lot through the stink of the drive-in's Dumpsters. At a discount shoe store, he bought a pair of calf-length rubber boots, then got back to the car and drove seven miles to the swamp where Carolyn Rappaport had died.

It was just sunset by the time he'd parked and pulled on the boots, but he knew the sky would stay bright for a while. Enough light to navigate by. He headed down into the marshy streambed.

The extensive dimpling of the mud under the water told him that Biedermann had had crews out here since last week. He wondered if the SAC had done something high-tech, like flying over the scene with a helicopter and computer-controlled scanning cameras and who knew what else.

He knew there was nothing physical for him to find here now. He was really after the atmosphere, the sorrowful ghost of the place. The reverberations of the awful things that had happened here. When you had a lot perking just below your conscious thoughts, the ambience of the crime scene could guide the flow of your intuition. Hidden details and half-formed ideas sometimes came forward. He squelched upstream, into the thin forest of stunted sumacs, trying to visualize the place as it had been eleven nights ago.

The culvert loomed, a brighter mass that cast a solid shadow on the standing water. Black in the tunnel. Mo stared at it, trying to shed the echoes of Mudda Raymon's "vision" and focus instead on the hard realities. It wasn't easy. Between his father's lapsed Catholicism and his mother's equally lapsed Judaism, he'd been born into a family environment that was pretty neutral, metaphysically speaking. But like most kids, he'd experienced an almost religious fascination with the supernatural and paranormal. As an adult, he'd worked hard to banish his native superstitiousness but hadn't totally succeeded. Yes, he was susceptible to Mudda Raymon's bullshit. Yeah, the old woman had named a few existential bogeymen:
Now hefighthimself,
alwaysfighting.
Maybe it was just that Carla had talked about his inner conflict, his self-negation and self-criticism, his ambivalence about his job, about the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, about life. But what about the
puppet
thing? How could old Grannie have picked such a relevant-seeming scary? Maybe Carla had told Mudda Raymon of her own vision of the puppetlike beings with lines of energy from their hands and feet. On the other hand, that left you to wonder how
Carla
had picked up on it.

Puppet-puppet watching you. Puppet-puppet gon' come after you.
It gave him a chill. Jesus, he hated being scared of things. Every cell in his body rebelled against feeling fear. Fear mastered your mind, your blood, your heart, fear
controlled
you. He hated feeling controlled. Right now he felt controlled by Pinocchio. Strung on lines, manipulated. Another reason he was here: some ritual confrontation with that. A symbolic breaking loose. It was hard to always be struggling against an invisible, unknown enemy. Sometimes you needed the catharsis of physically fighting back. It occurred to him that cutting the strings was not only necessary to staying human, it was necessary to being an effective investigator. Being able to cut through red tape, shake loose of procedural constraints, come at your opponent from the unlikely angle. Something to remember.

Mo checked his Glock, took out his flashlight, and slogged deeper into the marsh. Up ahead, the setting sun cut the trees into two distinct parts, orange-bright on top and green-black below the shadow of the ridge. Dark foliage converged on the stream a half mile up, and he instinctively headed toward the embrace of shadow, willing all the bogeymen to come fight him.

Farther in, the water deepened as the marsh narrowed between wooded hills on either side. The roar of the interstate was more distant here, absorbed by the trees.
This is good,
Mo thought, /
needed
this.
His head was emptied by sheer nervous alertness, any thoughts coming forward hung clear for him to inspect.

Carolyn's killer: He'd have to have parked his car along the road. But none of the nearby residents had reported seeing a car near the bridge. Didn't mean anything, maybe nobody happened to notice, maybe he'd pulled it into the bushes. Or maybe he'd walked or ridden a bike from someplace miles away. Or maybe he'd walked from nearby, maybe the police had unknowingly already interviewed the killer—one of the neighbors.

The sun now lit only the tops of the tallest trees. Here and there, far up the right slope, windows of houses came alight and pierced the darkness, but the marsh was a gloomy flat narrowing between masses of shadow. Still, he resisted turning on the flashlight. Best to save it for the real dark. Best to merge with the darkness, let it enter him, tell him its secrets. Let the animal panic of solitude and dark come up in him, give him some juice.

Mo trudged on, sometimes in the water and sometimes on the brushy banks. None of the State Police teams had come up this far, although Biedermann's people might have. It was almost night now, but he found he could make out the contours of the land. At one point a pale shape seemed to come forward out of the gloom and momentarily goosed his adrenaline, but when he got closer he could see it was just a washing machine, the old barrel-shaped kind with the ringer on top, rusted and half-buried in streambed silt.

By the house lights, he guessed he was approaching a residential area, and sure enough, he soon found himself only a hundred yards behind a large house, brightly lit with many windows. An outside spotlight was on at the other side, and he could hear the drub of a basketball. Farther on, the lights of another house were just visible through the trees.

Suddenly he felt like an outcast, a voyeur among these well-maintained residences, peering at these orderly lives from the disorder of his own. Probably time to turn back. No monsters had come out of the swamp to confront him except the usual inner demons of loneliness, self-criticism, sagging morale. Anyway, somebody might see him, get scared, call the police. Or shoot him: After Carolyn Rappa-port's murder, people's nerves were probably on edge around here.

He turned and began to slog back. As his fear-fired nervous energy ebbed, he felt disappointment come on. Aside from the initial high drama of confronting his scaries, this had been useless. No great inspirations had come to him, just two nagging questions, both familiar. One was
Who was Ronald Parker?
Clearly that was a big one, and he'd barely avoided throwing it in Zelek's face during his pep talk. But maybe they could narrow it down when they saw him on Thursday. The other was
Who the hell would think of recording and
broadcasting the screams of rabbits being slaughtered?
No doubt the session at the Reptile House had brought that to the fore again. There seemed to be a connection between those two questions.

Ten minutes later he emerged from the tree shadows and into the more open marsh, where the culvert materialized out of the darkness again. He stopped to look at it, remembering Carolyn Rappaport's body hanging from its wires. She'd spent her last hours as the puppet of a very sick being.
De puppet-puppet,
Mudda Raymon had said. Why'd she start saying it twice? Maybe some peculiarity of the Jamaican patois.
De puppet-puppet gon' come get you.

And just like that the sense of it came to him, an answer to the questions. Holy Jesus. It would put a lot of things together seamlessly: Ronald Parker, screaming rabbits, Zelek and Biedermann, human cruise missiles. Suddenly a rage-filled optimism washed through him, the sense that he had put something important together.
Yes,
he thought, running the scenario through the details of the cases.
Yes,
yeah. What a fucking nightmare. Oh, holy shit.
He had no idea what to do about it, but he exulted bitterly at seeing the pattern. Who should he talk to about it? Not Biedermann, definitely not yet, maybe not ever. Marsden? Maybe, have to give that some thought. St. Pierre, no, let him do the great work he was doing without biasing his judgment, keep him out of the line of fire. Rebecca, no—at least not until they'd had a chance to look at Ronald Parker.

He had just vaulted the railing at the end of the bridge when another insight hit him: Irene Bushnell had cleaned for the middle-aged banker couple on Monday mornings, leaving—they said—for another job at one o'clock. But the schedule Mrs Ferrara had provided showed Irene working only a half day on Mondays. Where had she been going for the rest of the day? How could he and St. Pierre have missed something so obvious? His instincts told him it was just the very end of a loose thread. Grab it and pull carefully, the whole thing could unravel.