Free Puppets by Daniel Hecht Page A

brain damage. He's not going to be able to tell us certain things."
    "Like—?"
    "The arranging. What exactly it signified to him, how it pertained to the original abuse he suffered. Also the use of the ice tongs on the head, why he wanted to injure them that particular way. Also whether he did the arranging before, during, after—"
    "He didn't do the arranging," Mo said. He remembered the insight that had come to him down in the musty bowels of the power station. "Or rather, he didn't do it directly. Everybody assumed the reason why his fingerprints were never found on the objects, or anywhere, was because he wore gloves—"
    "He had a box of latex gloves in the car when they caught him."
    "He did wear gloves. But he didn't do the arranging. His victims did. While he held their strings. While he' turned their heads, moved them from place to place with the ice tongs sunk into their temples."
    "Oh, Jesus," Dr. Ingalls said. She went quickly to sit down on the other couch.
    "You said yourself it was about control. Parker moved them like puppets. The whole point of the arrangements was just to exercise control—not so much on the environment, on the victims. To savor his ability to manipulate a living person absolutely. For hours and hours."
    "Oh, God." She looked as if she could visualize it too clearly. "We . . . we assumed the victim's fingerprints were on things because he always killed in their houses, and . . . and you'd expect their prints to be there. But it was also because they did the arranging. He made them. How horrible!" She blew out a breath, shook her head, troubled. But then she smiled again, wham, a solid Plains-states smile, unabashedly appreciative. "You are one smart cop! You've had this case for what, four days? I'm impressed!"
    Mo savored that for a second or two. And then Marie Devereaux put her head through the door. "Your lunch is here," she told them disapprovingly.

8
     
    T HEY ATE FROM PAPER plates, sitting on opposite sides of the coffee table and leaning forward over white cartons of moo shee pork, kung pao chicken, egg rolls, white rice, wonton soup. Dr. Ingalls hitched her skirt up to facilitate eating, still demure just above the knee, and spread several napkins on her lap. She ate like a stevedore, shoveling the food off her plate directly into her mouth with deft pivots of the chopsticks, smacking her lips. The food was great, Mo hadn't realized how hungry he was.
    After a while, Mo said, "You don't seem like a person who would go into forensic psychology."
    "I'm not!My main field is child psychology. My whole FBI connection is an accident—they consulted me on some letters from a child being held by kidnappers. Wanted me to get clues about her emotional state, maybe about the identity of her abductors or the location where they were holding her. I got a lot of things right, so they began calling me in on other things, not directly child-related. Given that adult psychoses usually result from childhood trauma, profiling really benefits from a developmental psychology perspective. I'm not proud of the fact, but I apparently have a talent for deducing the mental states of bad guys. So they keep coming to me."
    She wiped her mouth with a napkin and licked her lips. "But thank you. If I may say so, you don't strike me as a person who would go into homicide investigation."
    "How so?"
    "Well,you're too thoughtful, you're too self-critical,you're too uncomfortable with death and pain. I'd have pegged you as, oh, a historian, or a writer of popular books on something like archaeology or current science issues—" She looked at him penetratingly, observing that she'd scored hits.
    "What else," he said, feeling a little exposed.
    "Divorced recently." And then she looked surprised at herself."I'm sorry, that's—"
    "It's that obvious, huh? How about you?"
    She shrugged and went back to her eating, selecting a blackened, curled chili, looking at it closely before cautiously nipping the end of it. "I