Puppets Read Online Free PDF Page A

but he already knew what he'd find. On a side table he saw an arrangement of objects organized in geometric patterns: a pair of folded sunglasses, bracketed by two gardening gloves. Above them, a collection of pens arranged in a neat zigzag line with coins placed in each angle. A couple of stacks of music CDs, perfectly squared with the edge of the table, with an empty Gatorade bottle on top of each stack. At the computer desk, diskettes had been lined up side by side all the way around the keyboard, and a cork bulletin board had been arranged with similar precision, postcards and cartoons and jotted notes arrayed down the center in a symmetrical pattern surrounded by triangles outlined in colored thumbtacks. A compulsive symmetry. Once you noticed it, the arrangement of all the room's little things took on an eerie subliminal geometry, scary, like seeing the diamonds on a rattlesnake down in the grass, or the hourglass on a black widow spider.
    "You like the designs?" Melrose asked. "Bedroom's the same way."
    Mo's head had begun to ache again, and he could feel all the muscle pulls and bruises distinctly. He was thinking, If only I had made it to the desk and had signed out for sick leave. Just like two or three minutes head start, and somebody else would have gotten this.
    "You recognize this, Mike?" he asked St. Pierre.
    "Looks just like that guy, what do they call him, the control freak—"
    "Yeah." Mo wondered if Mike understood what that meant.
    The New Jersey State Police had begun calling him Howdy Doody, after the famous TV puppet of the 1950s. The first murders with the distinctive signature of strings tied to limbs and ritualized arrangements of objects had begun early in 1999. Three people killed in northern New Jersey, then three in Manhattan and another in the Bronx in a thirteen-month period, the remorselessly accelerating rhythm of kills typical of serial murderers. Mo knew Ty Boggs, who'd headed up the Bronx end of the investigation and was part of the inter jurisdictional task force, and they'd talked a little about the crimes. But Ty had been stingy with details. As with every serial spree, the police and FBI had kept many specifics of the crimes out of general knowledge. This had the several goals of discouraging the killer from changing his habits and maybe camouflaging his style, of being able to weed out bogus confessions, and of being able to differentiate between murders by the original artiste and future copycat crimes.
    Serial murder was the most horrendous and most difficult kind to solve. It was horrible because the habits of the killer, the repetition of certain types of torment or mutilation, spoke of some unfathomable sickness in the psyche, of a mind infested by demons that demanded a specific ritual. As did the motivation: The act of killing itself was the killer's objective, not particularly the end result.
    If you thought about that, it could mess you up inside.
    The difficulty in catching serial killers arose from the fact that unlike with most crimes the victims were not linked to the murderer by a web of interpersonal contacts, normal motivation, or cause and effect. Serial killers came from outside their victims' social spheres, so you couldn't nail them by establishing links between people with typical motives like jealousy or greed or revenge. Usually, the only connection was to be found in the psychology of the murderer, the compulsions or delusions or fears or hungers that drove him to kill. You had to inspect the psychological implications of each death, explore the symbolic narratives in excruciating detail.
    Getting that far into the mind of multiple murderers was not healthy, either.
    And all that aside, Mo thought, from a strictly professional standpoint there were other things that made this one a prospective nightmare. The administrative complexity of tying your work to an ongoing investigation by the FBI and other police agencies, the inter jurisdictional task forces and the