Puppets (39 page)

48

M
O ROLLED OUT OF bed Saturday morning with his head pounding as if he'd gotten stinking drunk last night. In fact, all he'd done was come home and put ice on his jaw. Getting home had been a heroic effort all by itself, given that he'd walked maybe three miles before he'd thought to call a White Plains cab to take him back to the barracks and his car. Once he'd gotten an ice pack on, he'd called Rebecca to let her know the latest developments. But, Friday night, Rachel was right there, they couldn't really discuss what to do. He'd taken four ibuprofen tablets and tried to think, then lay down and tried to sleep. Neither effort had been successful.

The bathroom mirror showed that the left side of his face was swollen and discolored. The jaw was too sore to touch. It was bad enough to get hit when you were expecting it, but getting cold-cocked while sitting down, your body absorbed all the energy at the point of impact. Plus Biedermann was a big guy.

As he got dressed, he reluctantly faced the reality that he'd have to go to the hospital to get the jaw x-rayed. Thinking of the hospital reminded him abruptly that this was Frank Marsden's bypass day, he'd wanted to be there when the old man went in, give Dorothea some support.

So he splashed water on his face, did his best to brush his teeth, and made it downtown to Cornell Medical Center in time to be there when Marsden and his wife arrived. Mo saw them before they saw him: a tired, worried, older couple coming in alone and looking as if they'd been having a fight or something. But they seemed relieved when they saw him, and suddenly he was glad he'd come.
Priorities,
Mo thought.

So he stayed through the morning as Frank was prepped, making small talk with Dorothea. Dorothea was a barrel-shaped woman with dyed dark-brown hair. She was a drinker, which was sometimes a problem for the marriage, but today she was just a scared aging lady trying hard to keep it together. For a while after Frank was strapped into a bed and waiting for the operating room, they stood with him in a corridor and tried to be peppy and upbeat. It was nobody's best performance. Frank had severe clogging, mild diabetes, and redline hypertension. Not a heart surgeon's dream patient.

At one point when Dorothea went to the bathroom, Marsden said, "So, you pissed because I made Paderewski acting unit coordinator?"

Mo shook his head. "What do you think?"

"I think you've got other things on your mind right now, you're preoccupied. What happened to your face?"

Mo lightly fingered the new bruises. "My preoccupations caught up with me. I'm fine."

Then they stood there in silence. Frank's face looked yellow and old, there against the crisp white sheets. After a while Dorothea came back, and then a green-suited crowd rolled Frank away. Mo stayed with Dorothea for four more hours until the surgeon came out to say it had gone great, couldn't have been better.

While waiting, Mo had tried several times to call Rebecca, but he hadn't reached her. He tried to tell himself not to worry, she often spent Saturday out and around with Rachel. She'd said something earlier about both of them needing new bathing suits. Probably shopping. But after a while he couldn't control his anxiety, so he found the card Zelek had given him and called Biedermann's number.

The familiar G.I. Joe voice answered, "Yeah."

"It's Ford."

"That was quick."

"No, I'm just checking in. Calling to let you know we're working on it, I'll call again as soon as we've got the materials together. Tomorrow, Monday at the latest. So you don't have to . . . get worried about anything."

"The only one should be worried is you." Biedermann chuckled humorlessly. "Shit, Mo, if I'd known it would change your attitude so profoundly, I'd have cropped you sooner."

Once Frank was in the clear, Mo left Dorothea and checked himself into Emergency. He waited some more in a different lobby, got x-rayed. They told him that he had a hairline crack in the left mandible, but that all he had to do for it was take it easy, keep the swelling down, eat soft foods. When he was done at the medical center, he swung by the barracks to pick up the parcel of old disposal-site maps St. Pierre had left and drove back to the mausoleum. Took four ibuprofens. Called Rebecca's answering machine. Lay down with the Glock on his chest and fell asleep.

It was eleven o'clock when she finally called back. He woke up in the dark, fumbled the receiver, mumbled hello.

"I'm calling late so we'd have some privacy. Rache is in bed, we can talk."

He gave her the details about his encounter with Biedermann and Zelek, the urgent need to return the materials and get away from the Geppetto side of the case.

She was quiet for a while, thinking about it. Then she asked, "And you feel all right about that? Just . . . turning away?"

"I feel great about it. I feel terrific."

"It doesn't bother you that this program, this whole situation, is horrible? A . . . a betrayal of human principles that maybe somebody should
do
something about? I mean, maybe these awful things happen because people like us keep
letting
them happen."

"Bugs the shit out of me. But so does global warming and sweatshop labor. It's not something I feel I can do much about. But more than that . . . " He petered out, his vocabulary failing him again.

"What?"

"I don't want to take the chance of anything happening. To you, to Rachel. To this thing that's just started up. With you and me. A month ago Biedermann and his guys, or Geppetto, they could have taken me out, I wouldn't have given a shit. But now it's—"

"You're kind of mumbling, Mo, I can hardly understand you." He realized he hadn't told her about the broken jaw. She went on, "I think I got the gist, though. Thank you. I feel the same way. And I know you're right, I just . . . you know. It doesn't go down easy." She was quiet for another moment. "I guess I'm willing to quit, but I can't get them the materials tomorrow. I was sweating about this, too, worried about the evidentiary value of the tapes and scans if. . . well, after Ronald Parker, I can't pretend this apartment is secure. So I took everything to a safe-deposit box. I can't get them until Monday. But they said Monday was okay, right?"

The prospect of a delay didn't make Mo happy, but there wasn't any choice. "Yeah. I'll call Biedermann, let him know. Just so they don't start thinking we're being uncooperative if we don't get in touch tomorrow."

They talked for a while more. Nothing about the case, it was as if once they'd made up their minds, it was gone. He'd been right, she and Rachel had gone out to pick up bathing suits and other hot-weather clothes. Bowling tomorrow night, she reminded him, and then she suggested that maybe Mo could spend the night afterward. Mo told her that sounded very, very good.

It was midnight by the time they got off the phone, but Mo called Biedermann anyway. Answered on the first ring, sounded wide awake. Thought it was amusing, Mo's keeping him so well informed.

It wasn't until two o'clock Sunday that he got around to looking at the old maps St. Pierre had dug up. Most dated from the fifties and sixties. Looking at them, Mo realized how much the area had changed in fifty years. There were fewer roads back then, no corporate headquarters, no interstates. The yard-square photocopies St. Pierre had provided were good, but the original maps had obviously seen better days, and the copies had reproduced all the-creases, rips, discolorations, and penciled notations.

Sure enough, dumps and junkyards were noted. Mo marked the locations with a yellow highlighter, then tried to find the equivalent places on a new Hagstrom road atlas. Given that road names had changed, new developments had sprung up, the scales of the maps were vastly different, it wasn't easy to correlate old with new. In fact it was tedious. It was also almost certainly a dead end. On the other hand, sitting at the kitchen table looking at maps, a cup of coffee in one hand, an ice pack in the other, was about Mo's speed for today. It was a lousy day outside anyway, overcast but not giving forth with the needed rain.

Plus, shit week began tomorrow, he'd need to be rested if he wanted to cope with everything that was coming at him.

It was one thing to say you weren't going to pursue the Geppetto scenario, another to stop thinking about it. As Mo worked, a question kept returning to him, something Rebecca had mentioned: What had triggered Geppetto to start his puppet factory in 1995, twenty-two years after the end of his involvement with the military psych projects? The hypothetical trigger was important because its nature would reveal something about Geppetto's "statement," his agenda. And knowing more about Geppetto's agenda could tell them what he was likely to do next. It might also throw some light on some of the troubling undercurrents of the Biedermann and Zelek thing.

Mo reminded himself that this was no longer his concern. He shook off the thoughts, unfolded another map, began marking off the dumps with the highlighter. He had just marked the third one when he startled and almost choked on a swig of coffee. He checked the location again: the hard curve of the road, then the stream.

Stupid, stupid, stupid fuck,
he chided himself.

The old map showed that the road had been called Dump Road back in the early fifties. A dirt road in a rural district then, but now paved and called Eldridge Estates Road. Between the interstate and an upscale residential area. The same road that less than a mile below the old dump crossed the bridge over the marshy stream where Carolyn Rappaport was killed.

He should have remembered it the moment they started thinking of old dumps. The wringer washer he'd encountered. The odd debris in the muck—an old toaster, a rusted chrome side mirror from some old car—probably washed downstream over the last fifty years.

Mo tried to tell himself it could be nothing, coincidence, irrelevant. The longest of long shots that it had any bearing. But he stood up feeling hot all over, suddenly in a hurry. It was three-thirty, a little late in the day but still enough time for a reconnaissance before dark, before going to meet Rebecca. He strapped on his shoulder holster, checked the Glock's magazine, then dug the Ruger out of the mattress and put on the ankle holster. He was thinking about the marsh, the deep forest uphill on either side: a big area, a job for more than one guy. Wondering what Mike St. Pierre had planned for his Sunday evening.

Mo parked at the bridge and pulled on the rubber boots as he waited for St. Pierre to show. Sunday afternoon, not much traffic. He kept trying to tell himself that there was probably nothing to this, it was another dead end. But there was a thrill in his nerves, that breathless pressure at the center of his chest, that told him this
clicked.
Yeah, as Carla had said: his radar, his gut. Whatever, his instinct told him this was something important.

Four-thirty. It would probably take the two of them a couple of hours, even if they found nothing of interest. So he called Rebecca on the cell phone.

"Hi, it's me," he said. "Listen, I'm going to be a little late for bowling. Or if I get something going here, I might have to skip it this week. You guys should probably go over to Star Bowl on your own, I'll meet you."

When he told her where he was, she sounded skeptical: "I thought Erik and his people looked over the marsh area pretty well. Whatever else Erik isn't, he
is
thorough."

"The old dump is farther up. I don't think they went up that far."

"And you don't think it's coincidence?"

"Could very well be," he agreed. No way to explain the prescient buzz he felt.

"What about Erik and Zelek—won't they frown on this initiative?" "I don't think so. I don't know if I care. If this gives us a chance to find Geppetto, to get to him before he . . . If we get to him fast, it may make the whole problem moot."

And then St. Pierre was pulling over, getting out with a grin, and it was time to go. Mo told Rebecca good-bye, gathered up the maps, and got out of his car. It was good to have Mike there, Mo thought.

Rough and ready, big, lanky eager beaver, anxious to prove his worth.

"Sorry to take you away from the family on a Sunday," Mo said.

"Hey, Lilly doesn't mind the overtime pay either." Mike was dressed in jeans and a loose short-sleeved sweatshirt and had put on rubber boots, too. He locked his car, took his gun out of a waistband holster, checked it, tucked it away again. Then he confessed shyly, "And, you know . . . I mean, I love my kids, but there are times when, you know? When you don't mind getting out of the house. It gets crazy with three of them, plus their friends." He looked over the marsh, the foliage grown greener and thicker since they'd last been here, and he squinted at the clotted sky. "You really think this could be something?"