Free Puppets by Daniel Hecht

wouldn't sound like some kind of macho posturing, then thought of Dr. In galls's frankness and spontaneity and decided the hell with it, he'd reciprocate. "I don't usually give as hit what guys like Biedermann want. I'll make my own decisions about my own cases. What I need to know, what I do. We're pros, too. With better solve and conviction rates than the FBI."
    She looked at him dubiously, but then grinned. It was nice to see the smile again, Mo decided, you could get hooked on making this woman smile.
    "Let me start with Ronald Parker," she began. She crossed her arms and he rankles, a nice shape against the window light. "What I'll do is, I'll conflate what I theorized about him in advance of his capture—much of which proved to be accurate—and what we now know about his background. If we're after a copycat, we'll want to draw any parallels from facts, not guesses."
    Mo nodded, clicked his pen.
    Okay, she said. What did we know from the victimology? Both men and women, an unusual pattern for organized serial killers, who usually strike only one gender. At first, she and the Behavioral Sciences profilers had wondered whether the killer might be bisexual. But given that there was no evidence of sexual assault upon the victims, a better guess would be that the choice of victims stemmed from the specifics of the killer's childhood trauma. Serial crimes were often symbolic reenactments of or retributions for psychological injuries sustained in childhood, abuses most often committed by parents, stepparents, or other relatives. The evenhandedness of this killer suggested he had been abused by both genders, maybe both mother and father, or at least blamed both parents.
    Too, there was a disturbing consistency in the appearance of the victims. All were blond-haired and light complexioned, medium to tall in height. This suggested, again, that the murders were symbolic retributions or reenactments, and Dr. Ingalls suspected the killer would prove to be blond and light-skinned, either because the original abusers were his parents and he'd have inherited their looks or because he was reenacting his own trauma and the victims were surrogate "selves."
    "So then we looked at the mode of death itself," she said. "The use of handcuffs, the suspension of the victims using fishline, and the meticulous organization of the objects at the murder scene told us this was all about control —exercising absolute control over the victims and their personal spaces was central to the psychological narrative. There are a great number of ways to exercise control, and the specific technique in this case suggested that the murderer had once been similarly controlled, maybe tied up. We even made a note that we might find scarring on the wrists or ankles of the killer, and sure enough, Ronald Parker shows evidence of prior dermal trauma at both sites. I'll show you."
    Dr. Ingalls rummaged in a file cabinet and came out with two photographs, which she handed to Mo. There was one close-up of hands and forearms, another of lower legs and feet. She sat next to him on the couch and pointed out the barely visible, irregular lines of paler skin. "These are Ronald Parker's wrists and ankles. We were right that his murders reenacted his own earlier trauma."
    Mo was impressed. He tried not to be conscious of her proximity, the smell of her hair, but failed. She got up again and returned to the window, Mo railing at himself for his adolescent vulnerability to the nearness of a beautiful woman. And then that thought hit him on the bounce—was she beautiful? Since when? Looking at her now, he decided, yes, very much so, just not in the typical ways. Jesus, he was in lousy shape, he thought. And Dr. Ingalls was sharp, she'd see it in him.
    She went on, looking troubled again: "We thought we were smart, but there were some things we never did pull together. We didn't get to question Parker before he—you know about this?— before he hanged himself, gave himself