Skull Session (24 page)

Then on Tuesday morning the car theft investigation came to a dead end as a guy Mo was scheduled to talk to, the one guy who knew anything, died during emergency heart surgery. It was an inauspicious start for the day.

Late Tuesday afternoon, he got some news that ordinarily would have made him feel great: One of the missing kids, Mike Walinski, surfaced again, alive and well. Mo took a call from Mike's mother, who told him Mike had called. Turned out he'd run off with a friend he'd met at summer camp the year before. The two boys had hitchhiked to San Francisco together. Mo gathered that one reason Mike had been so hard to find was that he'd discovered his true sexual orientation and was afraid to try to explain it to his parents.

Mo was glad the kid wasn't dead or maimed or whatever. And Mike's reappearance would just about nail the coffin lid on the go-nowhere multi-agency task force whose meetings Mo hated to attend—more support for Wild Bill's opinion that the whole missing kid thing was just a mild wave of adolescent rebellion in Westchester County. But in his current mood, he couldn't help feel the downside of Mike's reappear ance: another chunk falling away from his tinkertoy construction. No doubt Essie Howrigan would show up at some point too, and make Mo's theories look hke the crap they were. He'd been taken in by the wide, earnest eyes of Heather Mason, the eerie, oracular certainty of her pronouncements. The hell with it. He'd be better off selling insurance or something.

But Wednesday was different, the luck started to turn. Mo came in, went over his notes for the interview he'd scheduled, thinking about what approach he'd use. This was an interview Wild Bill should have done but didn't, a sixteen-year-old kid who had been a good buddy of Steve Rubio.

By ten-thirty he felt the need of some coffee, and took the opportunity to do a little background check on the kid he was about to interview. Code 913 hard-copy case files were kept in the main uniform office and held materials on recent juvenile run-ins with the police, including warnings and domestic troubles, and correspondence with the school liaison officer at Troop K headquarters in Poughkeepsie. He was elbow deep in a file drawer, just around the corner from the door to the uniform commander's office, when he heard Rizal's voice.

"It's like I told you," Rizal was saying. "I see the junker's been moved from the bottom of the driveway, so I drive up to see if everything's okay. I'm out there alone in the woods, the house is a wreck, the guy's yelling obscenities at me, he comes toward me with a crowbar in his hand—"

"Says he's Mrs. Hoffmann's nephew," Station Commander Miller's voice cut in. "That you had no reason to assume wrongdoing, that you were unnecessarily rough." Miller was thin, graying, a gentle man who probably should have been an Army chaplain, some man of the cloth.

"He claims he's got a medical problem, Tourette's syndrome, that makes him say things. I looked it up."

"I was
rough?
He said that? I requested he face the wall, I verified he was who he said he was. He seemed nervous, hke he was expecting trouble from me. I never heard of a medical problem that makes you tell a cop to fuck off. You believe that?"

"Was it really necessary to draw your gun?"

"When he didn't comply with my request, in this officer's opinion, definitely yes. The Rodney King scenario this was not, Chief. I said 'please' and 'thank you.' I identified myself as a law officer, I looked over his ID and returned it. That's it."

Still searching the file cabinet, Mo heard Miller sigh. "Write up what you just told me, will you, Pete? I think he just wanted to blow off steam, and I don't think it's going to turn into anything. But I'd like to have the paper so we're in the clear."

"You got it," Pazal said.

"So Highwood was in pretty bad shape?"

Rizal gave a whistle. "Are you kidding? Every window is broken.

From what I could see of the inside, it looks like a bomb went off."

"Fire? Or—"

"Not that I saw. Vandalism. I'd say kids have been going up there and throwing things around, in a major way, for a long time. This guy's got his work cut out for him."

"Well. It's a good thing Mrs. Hoffmann's getting the place fixed up. Sounds like a safety hazard." Miller paused, and when he spoke again his voice had turned hard: "Okay, so listen, Pete. Once in a while, keep in mind we've got our own PR to think of. We want the kiddies to like the nice policemen. You understand? I don't want to hear of another complaint about you anytime soon. And I don't want to hear that your gun's been out unless you had good reason to think someone's life depended on it."

"Gotcha," Rizal said airily. "Sir." Mo heard his heels click down the hall.

Mo did find a slim file on the boy, Terry Bannerman, which he took back to his office. But he had a hard time concentrating on it. The discussion between Miller and Pdzal had gotten him wired up. A vacant house, up a hill in the woods, kids coming to vandalize it. It fit the picture perfectly.

Mo checked his watch and found that he had another hour before the interview. Just enough time. He went up front to the dispatcher's desk and knocked to get her attention.

"Carmen," he said. "You must know this area pretty good, right?"

"In my job, I sure hope so." Carmen looked at Mo disapprovingly.

"You ever hear of a place called Highwood? Supposed to be an old mansion."

"Highwood Lodge. Over near the old Reservoir Road."

"Can you show me where it is?" Mo gestured to the area maps that dominated the wall of the dispatcher's cubicle.

Carmen scanned the maps and pointed to one. In the center of the page was the Lewisboro Reservoir, an irregular kidney-shaped lake about two miles long, starting just east of Golden's Bridge. To the north of the reservoir, sometimes paralleling the irregular shoreline and sometimes veering as much as a quarter mile away from it, ran Highway 138. To the south, zigging and zagging as it hugged the shore, ran the Lewisboro Reservoir Road.

She put her red-nailed forefinger on the map. "Right about here. Just east of that new Briar Estates development."

She returned to her seat while Mo looked closely at the map. The spot she'd pointed out was maybe a half mile from where the old road rejoined Highway 138. He'd been on that very road only a few days before, killing time before his appointment with the parents of Dub Gilmore.

Mo's excitement sent a tingle of adrenaline to his fingertips as he traced the meandering shoreline road. Rizal had said something about a junked car that had been blocking the driveway. He'd turned around in that same driveway, the one with the old stone pillars. He brought his finger up the line of the shore road to its intersection with 138, then moved it west until it came to the sharp bend where Richard Mason had been killed. There was not much more than a mile between the fatal bend in 138 and the driveway to Highwood.

Mo thanked Carmen, getting a distrustful raised eyebrow from her as he grinned wildly.
Screw Carmen's attitude,
he thought. Clearly, his luck was changing again.

29

M
O LOOKED AT THE KID seated across from him and felt a twinge of sympathy. Sixteen was a lousy age—not yet allowed to be an adult, no longer permitted to be a child. Terry Bannerman was a tall boy, too skinny, who sat jiggling one leg and trying to look aloof. He appeared to take great interest in the parking lot, visible through the windows of the guidance office at John Jay High School, where a scattering of brown leaves blew between the ranked cars.

Mo had decided on the show-them-you're-one-of-them approach, rather than the impress-them-with-your-authority routine, but so far it hadn't worked. Terry answered in monosyllables. He was wearing an aviator's leather jacket, khaki fatigue pants, and big Doc Martens, the boot of preference among the punk and skinhead crowd, but his slender frame and the rash of acne on both cheeks deflated his tough-guy pretensions. So far he hadn't once met Mo's eyes.

In the outer office, a secretary clattered the keyboard of her computer, and a noisy printer spat out a stream of paper that draped down the front of the desk and refolded itself on the floor. When the secretary got up, Mo saw she was wearing a tweed skirt that came to mid-calf and drew smooth over the sweet curve of her thighs. She saw him looking her way and smiled pleasantly, and Mo felt a pang of longing.

He plugged doggedly ahead: "So you and Steve were pretty good buddies."

"Yeah."

"So what did you do? When you hung out together?"

"Nothin'."

"Like what, 'nothing'?"

"Same old stuff."

"That's not a lot of help. Look, Terry, I'm not after your ass or Steve's. I'm just here to try to find Steve, make sure he's all right. I need to know where you guys went, what you did, who you saw, who maybe Steve knew."

Terry's gaze wandered past Mo to the outer office. "Sometimes we went to the Electric Grotto in Danbury."

"What's that?"

"Video games."

"Great. What else?"

Terry picked at his cheek and flashed an irritated glance just past Mo's left ear. "I don't know, okay? Same stuff. You go to parties, you go to games at school. Stuff like that."

Partly the kid was dodging him, but mainly he just lacked the imagination to figure out answers that might be useful. Terry Banner-man, Mo decided, wasn't Rhodes material.

Mo slogged on for another ten minutes, getting a couple of names of other friends, possible enemies, but basically getting nowhere. At last he flipped his notebook shut. "Okay, I guess that's it, Terry." He put his pen into his inner jacket pocket, letting Terry catch a glimpse of his Glock in its shoulder holster, then went on conversationally, almost as if talking to himself. "Funny, isn't it? You look around this area, everything seems like it's on the up-and-up, but there's some damn funny stuff going on behind the scenes. Like this thing with Highwood Lodge, for example, right?"

That caught the boy off guard. "You know about that?"

"Sure," Mo bluffed. "I mean, I know what I've heard. I haven't been up there yet myself. What was it like when you went up?"

Terry looked at the door as if he were considering bolting. When Mo swung it shut, he looked almost panicked.

"Look, Terry," Mo said. "You know what? I'm sick of dicking around with you. You're going to answer my questions right now. You're going to stop playing dumb. It's not cutting it with me." He went to stand over the boy. Terry leaned away from him. "What did you do when you went up to Highwood?"

"I didn't go," the boy said resentfully.

"But you know people who did. Steve did."

"Yeah."

"But he wanted you to go, right? And what did he say about it?"

"That you could just go in and take whatever you wanted. Or fuck around, smash things. The doors weren't locked."

"What else?"

"He went up there once with some other guys. He wanted me to go with him, but I chickened out."

"Why'd you chicken out?"

"I didn't want to get caught. The driveway was blocked, you'd have to walk all the way up and back. Somebody'd see you."

"Keep going," Mo said.

"He said it was all fucked up in there. Somebody'd been trashing the place. After a while he stopped going up."

"Because he was afraid he'd get caught?"

"No. He said there was something screwy about it. Everybody knew about it. There was some kind of satanic rituals up there."

"What kind of rituals?"

"Everybody said something different. Maybe like calling demons.

They said like a human couldn't do some of the stuff that was done up there—the way the place was trashed."

"Who's 'everybody'?"

"I don't know."

"You're going to tell me, Terry."

"I don't fucking
know,"
Terry said. He seemed close to tears. "A lot of guys would say they knew something, but it's all bullshit, they were making things up so they could sound cool. You could make up whatever you wanted. After a while people stopped talking about it."

Mo went back to his chair and stood behind it, thinking, drumming his fingers on the wooden chair back.

"Okay. That's all for today." Mo took out his wallet and handed Terry one of his cards. "This has my number on it. If you think of anything else, you call me up right away."

Terry took the card, then stood up, putting his hands into his jacket pockets, waiting to be dismissed.

Mo clapped him on the shoulder. "Hey, Terry, you've been a lot of help. Do me a favor, will you? Don't mention to your friends that I asked you about Highwood. Okay? Let's try to keep the rumors down about this."

"Yeah," Terry said noncommittally.

Driving back to the office, Mo felt a little guilty about being so rough on the kid. Maybe there'd been another way to get him to open up, but Mo had gotten frustrated with his sullen, guarded face and posture of resentment. As he was leaving the school, he'd been relieved to see Terry talking with a very pretty girl, showing her what Mo guessed was the card he'd given him. Why are girls that age so lovely, Mo wondered, when the boys are such geeks? How do the girls manage to fall for the graceless, pretentious, self-conscious little pricks? A miracle of nature.

Hunger was beginning to gnaw at his stomach, but he felt good. Here was another possible link to Highwood, another line converging on the southeast end of the Lewisboro Reservoir. Mo could intuitively tell it was a live lead. Should he talk this over with Barrett? No. It would be better not to push his luck with him until he had something more substantial.

One thing was clear, though—it was time to pay a call to Highwood. An off-the-record visit. Miller had said somebody was fixing the place up—the owner's nephew. Maybe he'd be willing to talk to Mo, let him look around the place. It was worth a try.