Skull Session (38 page)

47

"O
KAY, TO SUMMARIZE," Mo was saying, "we've got a number of possibilities. The problem now is to follow down each one to see what's real and what isn't. That's what these sessions are for."

They were in the smoking room. It was mid-afternoon, a dull day outside. Paul turned on the lights just to cheer things up. Once Cohen had declared the wiring safe, he'd ordered electrical service reconnected and had bought a couple of clamp lamps at the hardware store. It would still be a while before the new furnaces could be installed, but having electric lights meant that they could work longer hours after sunset. Dempsey was working in the main room, at last able to use an electric soldering gun to reassemble lead mullions in the badly damaged windows. Now they'd see some real progress.

Paul had been surprised when Mo suggested the three of them hold a skull session, not imagining such a term would be vernacular in the Bureau of Criminal Investigation. Mo said that BCI staff often put together skull sessions, where the agent in charge of a case, his supervisors, various forensics experts, maybe some fresh ears and eyes, all sat down and brainstormed about where to go with a case that had stalled out.

"Anything goes," Mo had told them. "No matter how far out. A skull session is when you let whatever's in there"—he tapped his head—"rattle around, recombine, come out in whatever form it takes. If an idea rings bells in somebody else's head, then you toss it around. If it doesn't strike any sparks, it probably doesn't hold water. Sorry about the mixed metaphors." His apologetic grin was directed to Lia.

Mo had brought them up to date on his meeting with the man who turned out to be the son of the original Falcone, Vivien's gardener. He'd also done some homework on Royce's finances but hadn't really gotten anywhere with it. Trooper Rizal had indeed been bullshitting Paul with his talk about a drug investigation involving Highwood. Paul had to credit him with a sense of the dramatic: He'd saved the story of his visit to the historical society until last, building the suspense until he revealed that Royce and Rizal had been juvenile partners in crime.

"Leaving us with the question of whether they are still 'collaborating' on any little schemes," Lia said. "Like trying to scare us or tempt us away from fixing up Highwood."

Lia seemed impressed with Mo's ingenuity. And he did have a kind of heat as he stalked back and forth, lost in his story, his smart, tough talk. He rolled his shoulders as if loosening up for a fight.

When no one had any more to offer, Paul told Mo about Royce's visit, the sense of threat in his comments. Mo took notes.

"Making me more sure than ever your cousin ties in," Mo said. "Just how or why, we don't know, but we'll get there. Anything else? No matter how wild?"

Again, Paul debated mentioning his other ideas, his intuitions.
Tell
them now,
his mind screamed,
the door's open.
But he couldn't. He couldn't match Mo's certainty or Lia's enthusiasm. His thoughts had become too personal, too revealing:
Weird medical conditions that give
people super strength, secret societies from a hundred years ago, violent
psychopaths
imprisoned in windowless rooms. Paul's gone nuts, gone morbid. He's got
a neurological condition, so he thinks of everything in those terms. He's got a son
with mental problems, so he projects that predicament onto everyone. He's letting
this place get to him.

Mo had been watching him closely. "Why do I get the feeling that you're not happy about where we're going with this?"

Paul thought for a moment about how to phrase it. "I keep feeling that we're ignoring what we see here at the house. Maybe we can answer the
why
and the
who
if we can just answer the
how."

To Paul's surprise, the question seemed to pierce Mo. For a time the detective seemed to be looking inward. "Duly noted," he said simply. "We should give it more thought."

"Something that's been bothering me since you told us about Falcone," Lia said. "That Falcone Senior disappeared. His son thinks he's dead because his family pride makes him need to see it that way. Or he claims to think that, to throw you off. But what if the elder Falcone isn't dead?"

"Right," Paul said, glad the attention had shifted from him, "and he's living around here, in the woods like the Leather Man. And he's still got a grudge."

"Leather Man?"

"A famous eccentric who roamed this area, sort of a wild man. A hundred years ago."

Mo rolled his eyes. "Stranger things have happened."

"What about you, Mo?" Lia asked.

"Me?" Mo walked away again, turned, the restless energy of a panther in a cage. "I keep coming back to the son, Royce. He's got something to gain by your aunt's leaving the house. Either he lays hands on something here, or something else. He wants her gone, that's why he doesn't want you to fix the place up for her."

"How would that tie in with your missing kids?"

Mo looked bothered by the question. "Maybe no connection. And maybe the kids got hurt because they happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Or maybe the psychopathology that did all this manifests in other ways as well. Like serial killing."

They mulled it over for a time. Paul felt tics building. A mournful tune was playing in his head, infuriating him: "Ringo's Theme," The Beatles, 1964. "That bo-oy took my love away." He played the rhythm with his tongue on the roof of his mouth, angry at himself. Pathetic. But Lia and Mo looked great together, they had some of the same, what,
aura,
the same
juice.
The fact certainly hadn't escaped Mo's notice.

Plus there were the things he couldn't bring himself to mention. Dempsey's strange behavior: In a flash, he saw Dempsey, harboring some grudge against Vivien, coming up and ripping the place apart. The old fighter still had banded muscles in his working man's arms, the deep chest of an athlete. The image played like a movie in his head, and he shivered involuntarily. Not just the brutality of it, the deception.

Dempsey, the one person he'd always counted on. But who could you trust? Could you really trust anyone? Paul bit his tongue. He was beginning to sound like Vivien. He was right to hold back—there seemed to be no end to his paranoia.

They spent the next fifteen minutes thinking up practical steps to take. Mo would look into Royce some more, see if there was anything else to be found on Falcone, explore the Royce-Pdzal connection. He'd make another attempt to talk to Heather Mason. Paul and Lia would keep on with the papers, looking for anything else on the Philippine connection. Paul would talk to Vivien.

And,
Paul thought,
try to meet with Stropes. And make Dempsey talk.

"I've got a question for you, Mo," Lia was saying. She beckoned him to turn, and when he did she pointed to his gun. "Do you always carry that?"

Mo smiled, looking flattered by her attention. "Not when I'm in the shower."

"Do you ever have to use it?"

The detective lost his smile. "On occasion, yes."

"Can I see it? Is it some special kind? My father likes a Walther 9millimeter."

"Glock 17, also a 9-millimeter. What, uh, occasions your interest?"

Mo had gotten stiff, lost his insouciance, Paul thought. He made no offer to show the gun to Lia.

"We brought a gun with us," Lia said. She brought out the box containing Ted's revolver. "Smith and Wesson .38. Any advice? I'm assuming you're an expert."

Mo lifted the gun out, flipped the cylinder and inspected the weapon.

"This has been well taken care of."

"My brother-in-law's an ex-cop," Paul said. "It's his gun."

"You want advice? I'll give you some: Don't take it out of the box again. Guns seem to beget shooting. Shooting seems to beget serious mistakes."

"You say that like you know what you're talking about," Lia said.

"Another suggestion: Don't use it to frighten somebody. Don't think it'll accomplish anything by waving it around. It's not a fucking magic wand. If you show it, use it."

"Not a magic wand—I think Paul and I can grasp that, conceptually." Lia smiled at Mo, gently mocking his sudden seriousness, and it seemed to work: He came back out of whatever mood had taken him.

"Okay," Mo said. "Sorry. I don't like guns. A necessary evil. But I do have a suggestion for you. If you're going to load it, use the hollow points. It looks like your brother-in-law put a box of them in there."

"What's the difference?" Paul asked.

Mo tilted his head toward the door. "I'll show you. We'll let off a couple of rounds. Not SOP for a New York State Police employee, but who gives a fuck? Excuse my French."

They went out to the driveway. Under Mo's supervision, Paul found a suitable target, a three-foot length of rough-cut two-by-eight lumber from the carriage house. Paul propped the board upright at the top of the retaining wall at the curve of the driveway, a slope of soft earth behind it. Mo walked them back twenty paces, loaded the .38 with bullets from one of the boxes of ammunition Ted had provided.

"Go ahead," he said. "Take a few pops."

Lia offered the gun to Paul, but he shook his head. With the look of focus on her, face set, eyes alive, she checked the cylinder, closed it, slipped the safety.
Beauty and the beast,
Paul thought, although it didn't look foreign in her hands. She took a stance and with both hands aimed at the board. The explosion made him jump. The board didn't move.

"Out of practice," Lia said.

"Excellent form, though," Mo said. Then he looked embarrassed.

Lia aimed and fired again, missed, held her stance, fired twice more, knocking the board over with her last shot.

They went to inspect the board. A hole the diameter of a pencil had appeared near its upper right edge. Where the bullet emerged, it had flipped off a chip of wood the size of a postage stamp, but otherwise the hole it had burrowed stayed the same width all the way through two inches of pine. Paul set up the board again.

"Okay. So that's solid point," Mo said. He ejected the spent shells, then loaded the .38 with one bullet from the other box. "This is a hollow point."

They paced back and Mo turned, fired. The board did a back flip. The earth behind it was now littered with chunks and chips of yellow wood.

Mo walked back and leapt easily up the retaining wall to retrieve the board. When he brought it back down and showed it to them, they could see that the bullet had gone in small and come out in a ragged, fist-sized crater.

"That's hollow nose," Mo said. "In flesh they're hke little bombs. Somebody's coming at you, you even tip him and he'll lose a handful of tissue. He'll lose interest in you, fast."

Lia watched Mo with one eyebrow raised. "I take it you've had some experience."

Mo looked away.

"Show us, Mo."

Mo started to protest, then shrugged. They walked back with him to the middle of the drive and turned. Paul didn't see him draw, but suddenly his Glock was in his hands and without a pause he was firing. The first shot flipped the board up, and Mo's successive shots kept it walking, flipping end over end, uphill. He fired five times in no more than two seconds. When he was done, the board had traveled twenty feet uphill. Wood chips littered the slope.

Lia's jaw had dropped. "That's. . . uh, impressive, I guess you could say," she said at last.

Mo put his gun away. He shrugged again, straightened his jacket lapels, checked his watch. "Thanks," he said.

After Mo had gone and they went back inside, Lia appeared thoughtful.

"Our friend Mo," Paul prompted, "is a remarkable fellow."

Lia nodded.

"I take it that's good shooting."

"It's supernatural shooting," Lia said. The cold had brought color to her face, a blush high on her cheekbones, the kind movie stars paid fortunes to achieve. She picked up a sheaf of papers, started going through them—rather listlessly, he thought.

Mo certainly did have a showman's instinct. The marksmanship, the nonchalance, the understatement. How much of it was conscious, a show to impress Lia? Hard to tell. And Lia: Did her idea of risk include risking their relationship? Even a month ago, he'd have said no. But clearly her risk-taking compulsion was growing, permeating all parts of her life. Now, about Mo, he couldn't be sure. Was it just his changing neurochemistry, or was there something there he should worry about?

Lia interrupted his musings. "I just thought of something."

"What's that?"

"Rizal. The name. It's been nagging at my memory since last week. I can't quite remember the context, but I think I've come across it in Vivien's papers." Lia looked thoughtful for a moment. "Stupid of me. But I'll try to dig it up again. Don't let me forget to tell Mo—I should probably call him," she said, brightening.

48

M
O RETURNED TO HIS OFFICE feeling like he'd been riding a roller-coaster. His heart had flown up like a lark in springtime at the sight of Lia. He'd had to muster all his self-control to keep their discussion focused and purposeful. God, she was everything he'd ever wanted. No one had ever clicked like this. Being around her had been at once ecstatic and painful.

But then Paul kept asking
How?
and Mo kept thinking,
Superman.
Superman did it.
Thinking about it in that wrecked house, Mo had felt momentarily sick all over. A strange feeling, a dark deja vu.
Don't you
want to know what happens to the detective?
Roller-coaster down.

But then Lia had given him the perfect excuse to show off, and he'd gone out to the driveway and had just let his gun do what it did so easily. And he'd felt Lia's eyes go keener, more attentive. He'd fucking
basked
in it. God, to see that again. And to see her shooting, legs wide, a trim sweater showing her perfect waist, the athletic grace and competence of her shooting form. Roller-coaster up.

And yet, driving away, he'd felt more than a little remorse. Paul had caught the whole thing. And Paul was a good guy. He had some nervous disorder, Mo was certain, that made him start to say things and stifle himself, or make an odd gesture now and then. But otherwise he seemed an admirable guy. He had the kind of build Mo had always wanted—rangy, tall, well-muscled—and that open, square face. A person who went by his conscience, always. A noble look, a face that had seen a large measure of sorrow and had found something to sustain himself with despite it, and kept a sense of humor into the bargain. Kind of the way King Arthur was always portrayed in the movies. Right— and Lia was Guinevere, leaving Mo to be Lancelot, the king's most trusted friend, and his betrayer. Roller-coaster down again.

Then, stopping at home briefly on the way back to the barracks, he'd found her voice on his answering machine, telling him thanks, telling him it was good to see him again, and oh, by the way, Rizal was a Philippine name and Rizal had apparently helped Royce feed razor blades to some show dogs in the distant past. There was an excited, confiding tone in her voice. What else was she telling him? His neck veins pulsed as he replayed her message. His instincts were screaming at him:
Go for it. For once in your life, reach for what you really want. Respect
yourself enough to believe it can be reciprocal. It's too bad about Paul, but it's
nobody's fault, all's fair in love and war. She knows herself, she makes her own
choices.
Roller-coaster way up.

It was almost four o'clock by the time he made it back to the barracks, just enough time to follow up on a couple of small details. He picked up a handful of mail from his box, checked his phone messages, and filed some notes on other cases. Then he dialed Helmut Pierce's number at the Vallhalla lab to see about the scrapings he had taken from the walls at Highwood. Dr. Pierce wasn't available, the secretary said, but he had left a message for Mo.

"The samples definitely include blood," she said. Mo's hopes leapt. He'd finesse a way to have come by the samples legally, open Highwood up for a real forensic investigation. "Blood of a
Procyon lotor,
he says."

"What's a
Procyon lotor?"

"I asked him. He always does this, thinks everyone knows everything he does. It's the Latin name for a raccoon. It's raccoon blood."

Roller-coaster down. One of those days, start to finish.

But his pulse rose abruptly when, sorting his mail, he came across another monogrammed, lavender-tinted letter. His hands shook as he slit the envelope.

Dear Detective Ford,

In my story, what happened was I got tired of waiting in the car and went
down the road. It was so dark I couldn't see very well. Then I heard someone
coming, running, and I got off the road and hid in the bushes. It was Richard,
and behind him someone else. The first part was bad, when he got folded in
half backward and I could hear the sound in his back like someone cracking
their knuckles, and then he got turned almost inside out. But the worst part
was right afterward, when there was just this wheezing from him, I think his
lungs were still going even though they weren't connected anymore, like
Richard was just this meat machine that didn't know yet it was broken and its
parts were still trying stupidly to work. It humped on the ground for a few
seconds and I couldn't stop looking at it.

Probably the same thing happened to Essie, but I didn't see that. Probably
it happened to those other kids
too
—/
heard you talking to my mother about
them.

Is this what you wanted me to tell you?

The question that keeps bothering me is about what Richard was, right
afterward. Was he just that meat machine, breaking down because the Richard
part of him was gone, and it was still going, automatically, for a second or two?
Or were the noises it made really Richard, still in there and trying, to talk or
move but unable to because his meat machine had been so completely screwed
up? Which one am I? Which is worse?

But I've decided on a title for the story. I call it "Five Things Worse Than
Dying," because the schizophrenic girl keeps thinking of things and she makes
a list. Here's the list:

1. Being just a meat machine, almost like you're trapped inside of it, it does
what it does whether you want it to or not.

2. Losing your sense of what a human being is, and so not having any idea
what you are or where you belong.

3. Living life but not being able to feel it, because it's either not enough or
it's too much.

4. Being so alone, you're not sure other people are real.

5. Going through life not ever sure whether something is just inside your
mind or whether it's really in the world outside you.

Mo rocked back in his chair, feeling Heather's words as if they were blows, battering him remorselessly. After a stunned moment, he folded the letter and covered it with his notebook to shield himself. On the heels of his shock came anger, a bone-deep hatred for whoever or whatever had done this to the poor kid.
Somebody was going to have to pay.

For half a minute he labored to calm himself, then dialed the Masons' number, only to get the answering machine again. He left another pleading message and hung up, suddenly feeling, a sense of the impossibility of taking this on. He knew what a shrink would say about the letter: a plea for attention, a cry for help. But was it only that? The part about what happened to Richard—had she really seen something? Was what she wrote real or delusion, as she herself seemed to ask, or a third, more devious possibility that she didn't mention: fucking with Mo's head? A complex, troubled child's idea of a joke, of kidding around?

He was debating what to do next when the phone rang. It was Bennett Quinn, agent in charge of the case of the human thigh in Ridgefield, Connecticut.

"Sorry it's taken me so long to get back to you," Quinn said. He had an agreeable, tired-sounding voice, a New Jersey accent. "We've had some action on the severed thigh. I don't know what you're after, but maybe this will help. It's a little unusual."

"I'm after something unusual."

"Good. See, here these kids are playing around in the woods near Highway 35 and they find this human thigh, but nobody seems to be missing one, right? It's obviously been around for a while, maybe a month or more. Some animal tooth marks, it's been partly eaten, dogs, raccoons. For a while we check out the idea that maybe it's from a grave, but no embalming chemicals show up in the tests, so that's out. You can see why we were stuck."

"So what happened?"

"We found the rest of the body. Remains are unrecognizable, but from dental records we find out it's a Priscilla Zeichner, twenty-four years old, lived in Waterbury. The reason we didn't locate the rest of her right away is she was found in the bushes next to some railroad track four miles away. It's a dedicated track, about three miles long, runs from the Lanier Company plant to the main trunk freight line. Lanier's a big employer over here—they build these huge container tanks for like gasoline tanker trucks? The only time their track gets used is when they have an order being shipped out, flatcars full of stainless-steel tanks. Wooded area, no houses nearby, no traffic on the line for anyone to notice Ms. Zeichner's remains, until the crew on the next shipment out found her. Five days ago." Mo's hands were tingling. "I take it she w a s . . . in pretty bad shape?"

"Oh yeah. Missing more than her thigh, I'll tell you that. Couldn't have identified her without the lab work. We're figuring she got hit by the Lanier train that went out on November second. The thigh, we don't know how it got four miles away except some dogs carried it. But the date we've pinned down tight—once we ID'd her, we found that ties in with when she was last seen, according to her friends."

"What was she doing over in Ridgefield? On the Lanier train tracks?"

"Well, that's what we wanted to know. We started asking around. You know. Apparently the boyfriend's from over your way, but what they might've been doing at this end of the state we don't know yet."

"So how're you looking at it? Accident or—"

"Let's say we're keeping our minds open. Could be accident, sure—you've got to figure nationwide there's two hundred fifty-some train-pedestrian deaths a year, right? Happens. But we're real interested in the whereabouts of the boyfriend, Eddy."

"I'll bet. Any leads?"

"Hey, this just broke open for us," Quinn said, laughing good-naturedly. "I figure we've done pretty good so far."

After they hung up, Mo checked his regional atlas, which showed the Lanier tracks running from the plant, about five miles east of the New York border, southeast into Ridgefield. Less than ten miles, as the crow flies, from Highwood.

He brought up the computer file he'd started, the calendar he'd built for the missing kid case.
Cycles.
Calculating on a projected cycle of about forty-four days, he'd figured that a third cycle of violence would have had to happen in early November. And there it was: November 2nd, the date Priscilla Zeichner disappeared, plugged right into the projection. Which left December 16th, give or take a few days, as the next one. Eight days away.

So no matter how he kept trying to stay clear on familiar turf like financial motives and so on, there was a big ugly scary that kept popping out at him. The general drift of it was that somebody was chopping people to pieces, by means unknown, at fairly regular intervals, in upper Westchester County. How many people? Two at least, and maybe Essie Howrigan, and Priscilla Zeichner's boyfriend, and maybe Dub Gilmore and Steve Rubio, and maybe more. So where were the others? They could be buried, they could be lying along some other seldom-used railroad track. The woods could be full of body parts. How would it work? The perp or perps did the deed and bagged up the remains and put them someplace, like the road, like the tracks, that would make the whole thing look like a somewhat bizarre but ultimately believable accident. If John Wayne Gacy could keep twenty-seven corpses secret in the crawl space of a ranch house in suburban Milwaukee, somebody could stash an army of them in the woods of upper Westchester.

And somehow, into that you had to fit a crazy kid who claimed fucking Superman did it and who brought up existential questions best left unasked, and a big house all wrecked up, high school kids talking about Satanic rituals, Paul and Lia only half kidding around about Falcone Senior gone wild and living in the woods.

And hard-boiled, pragmatic Mo Ford, try as he might, couldn't quite disbelieve any of it. It was truly the shits.