Skull Session (16 page)

The problem for Mo was that he could remember it all far too well, he didn't need the odd looks at the barracks or the comments of pricks like Pdzal to remind him. He didn't think of himself as particularly tough or cowardly, he hadn't felt either fear or anger. There was just the unexpected, brutal impact of the DEA man hitting the railing, the oddly fascinating and revolting hollow bowl of his brain case, the Rorschach splash of blood and fluids on the stairs. The almost-complete cessation of conscious thought. The cottony deafness that followed his own explosive shots in the narrow brick gangway.

And none of that mattered anyway. After a lot of sleepless nights spent sifting through what had happened, he'd distilled out the three things that really bothered him, the three nasty gritty facts that wouldn't go away. One was that he now knew that even though he'd gotten his feet wet before, he could react unpredictably to gore—there was a strong possibility that, faced with anything like the DEA man's empty head, he'd freeze up again.

The second was the possibility, however slim, that he might have done something for Dickie and had failed to do it.

But worst was the frightening secret he'd managed to preserve through all the hearings and debriefings by lying slightly about what he saw when the gunmen came into the gangway. The truth was that his reflexive firing, those six lucky shots, would have been directed at anyone who had come off those steps at that moment—a kid, say, or Dickie himself. Or anybody. The big drawback of his reflexive, instinctive shooting. Eating away at him was the sense that he could no longer trust himself. Nobody, not his partners or bystanders or victims, nobody was safe around a guy who'd shoot like that. If he had any real integrity, he'd quit, get a job that didn't put a weapon within his reach.

18

"H
EATHER is UPSTAIRS in her room," Mrs. Mason said. "I told her you would be coming to talk to her, but I thought you and I should talk for a little while first."

"Sure." Mo put his briefcase down on a wrought-iron chair and leaned against the counter. The Masons lived in one of the exclusive subdivisions built since the IBM offices moved in, a large pseudoTudor-style house on a road that looped through heavy older forest. Now they were standing in a solarium, filled with plants of every description, that extended the length of the house on the south side. Mrs. Mason stood at a counter set against the sloping glass wall, working a trowel in a large terra-cotta pot. A slim woman, dressed in peach running sweats and blue denim apron. Dark hair streaked with gray, pulled back into a loose ponytail. Mid-forties, Mo guessed. He was relieved that although she was a pleasant-looking woman, she wasn't another Janis Howrigan. He would be able to concentrate on business.

The air in the solarium was agreeably warm, filled with humidity and the smell of green leaves and blossoms. He waited as Mrs. Mason went on working, wetting the soil occasionally with a watering can.

"As I told you," she said at last, "I'm ambivalent about meeting you today. On the phone I said I was concerned for Heather, but that's only part of the truth." She looked at him intently for a moment, with deep brown eyes that carried that almost mystical light of sorrow or loss he'd seen in the eyes of the other parents. "Okay," Mo said, feeling she expected him to say something.

"The rest of the truth is that it's hard for me too, and for my husband. Of course we'd like you to find the person who ran over Richard. But it's been four months, Mr. Ford. We've spent it grieving, and coping with Heather, and wondering whether we were good enough parents.

Whether it was wise to have encouraged Rickie to live at home after college. Wondering what we could have done differently that would have somehow put him anywhere but where he was that night."

She placed a small tree into the pot, sorted its roots, and began spooning more soil around them. "So," she said, "after you do this for a long time, after you feel like hell every day for a long time, after your marriage almost falls apart, you have to either decide to grieve forever or try to live again. Just in the last couple of weeks, my husband and I have decided to try to do that. It's still a very fragile effort, Mr. Ford. It's all too easy to fall back into"—she made a slack, hopeless gesture with the trowel—"all that."

"I understand. I'm grateful you agreed to see me." He couldn't help liking her, the resigned, determined way she spoke and moved.

Mrs. Mason removed her apron and sat at a small wrought-iron table where a silver coffee service and cups waited. She poured two cups of coffee.

"So, I'd like to know what brought you here today. Have there been . . . developments? You have some sort of lead or clue or—?"

"Not exactly. Actually, no. None of the regular investigative channels have turned up anything new."

He'd thought she might get angry, but she just took a sip of coffee.

"We assumed that much. Then why are you here?"

"Two reasons. One, to meet you, see if I can pick up on something Detective Avery might have missed. Two, to see if you or Heather can provide me with any information about what may be a related case."

"All right."

"Let me start with some general questions. How would you describe Richard's mood in the period preceding his death? Happy? Unhappy?"

"He'd had a disappointing year. He didn't really want to come home. I think he wanted to find the right girl at school and find a good job. And none of it had quite happened yet. So he came home for the summer."

"Were there family tensions?"

"Of course there were. We had our problems. I wish we'd sorted them all out when Rickie was alive. But we didn't." She paused, blew her nose into a napkin. "I'm not, not,
not
going to start crying. I have done enough of it." This she said like a chant, to herself, a little mantra of self-control. It seemed to work. When she went on, her voice was level again. "But Mr. Ford, every family has its problems. If anything, Richard seemed to be in a better mood the last three or four weeks."

Mo sipped his coffee, allowing her time to regroup.

"When you talked about connections to a related case, what did you mean?" she asked finally.

"I think there may be connections between Richard and some other young people who disappeared around the time he was killed. There's a chance that what I can find out from you and Heather may help save the lives of some of the others. It's probably a long chance. But if there's any chance at all, I've got to give it a try."

"What connections do you mean?"

Mo told her the names of the missing teenagers, saving Essie Howrigan until last. Mrs. Mason shook her head no for each of the names until he mentioned Essie.

"Essie—she was the girl who came to visit Heather."

"Yes. What can you tell me about her?"

Mrs. Mason thought for a moment, and again Mo was impressed with her, the control she maintained. "Essie was part of the Teen Companion program. She visited Heather twice a week. At some point she stopped coming, and they sent over a different girl."

"Did you know the Howrigans?"

"No. Victor and I meant to introduce ourselves to her family at some point. It just . . . we never got around to it. With all that happened."

"What was your impression of Essie?"

"She was wonderful. She was extremely pretty, but she wasn't vain or spoiled as so many pretty girls are. Intelligent, very courteous without being tense or artificial. Mature for her age. Heather can be . . . difficult. Essie did a fine job of weathering the rough spots."

Mo took notes in his own illegible shorthand. "And what sort of relationship did she have with Heather?"

"As far as we could tell, a good one. As I said, Heather can be very hard to relate to. Essie seemed to do quite well. Of course, I wasn't always here when she came. I stayed home for the first few visits, but once I got to know Essie I took the opportunity to do things out of the house. I felt secure that Heather was in good hands with Essie and the Gonzalezes, my household staff, here. In the past five years, with Heather at home a lot of the time, I have often been housebound. I was very grateful to have someone like Essie here. I took a weekly dance class, Mr. Ford, Victor and I could go to movies or visit friends at
their
houses. Then Rickie was killed. Right around then, they called to say Essie wouldn't be coming." She massaged her forehead, which had drawn into furrows. "Oh," she said, realizing what she'd just said. "So there's one of the connections, right?"

"How long had Essie been coming, at that point?"

"I'd say three months. Yes, I think she started coming in April."

Not long before Richard Mason would have come back from college, Mo was thinking. He wouldn't ask her about that, he decided. Not yet. He poured himself another half cup of the superb coffee and swigged it, not sure whether the excitement he felt was the edge of caffeine hitting his bloodstream or something else. It just might all connect. If he remembered correctly from Wild Bill's notes, the Masons had gone out the night Richard was killed, returning at around midnight from dinner with friends.

"Mrs. Mason, before I meet Heather, I'd like you to tell me about her. I know the clinical definition of schizophrenia, but I don't know what it means in terms of Heather's behavior."

She drew a deep breath, let her shoulders slump. "Schizophrenia is just a name. The fact is, everything has a name, but names don't necessarily mean anything. What does 'love' mean, Mr. Ford? Do you 'love' your wife? Your dog? Pizza? America? How many meanings does the word have? The same is true with psychological terms. Only there you have complete disagreement to compound the issue. No one can list all the ways schizophrenia manifests in behavior." She had a lot of anger here, Mo saw. "The term ends up not meaning anything. No one knows all the types of craziness."

"You said she's bright."

"She's mathematically gifted, she reads at an adult level, mainly clinical texts about psychopathologies. Yes, she's very intelligent. Maybe that's one of her problems."

"You keep referring to the degree to which Richard's death affected Heather. Were she and Richard very close? Or do you think the particular nature of his death—"

"We told her almost nothing about the accident. No, it wasn't that. He was important to her. You have to understand that she lives in a type of isolation you and I can only vaguely imagine. When Richard came home from school, I think he filled a gap in her life. He was her own flesh and blood. They often did things together."

"What sort of things?"

Mrs. Mason opened her hands to each side. "What young people do. They went to movies, went swimming sometimes. Shopping. Concerts at Caramoor."

"Did Essie ever accompany them?"

"Once or twice. Essie could control Heather better than Richard, if she got difficult in public."

Mo nodded, taking notes. Mrs. Mason continued, slipping into reminiscence, and he let her go on, looking for the lines that converged. At last she shook her head, as if to clear it.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I have probably gotten off track. If you'd like, we can go up to Heather's room now. I think you'll have more luck with her if she feels like she's on her own turf, but I can't promise she'll cooperate, and I don't have any way to compel her to."

"Understood." Mo followed her through the house and up the broad staircase.

Heather's room turned out to be a small suite—one large room, a bathroom, and a bright alcove facing the backyard. It was a reassuringly normal, adolescent girl's bedroom: white carpet, white curtains trimmed with pink, stuffed animals on shelves and bureaus, a boom box surrounded by piles of CDs. On the walls, among pinups of musicians, posters of Freud and Einstein. The only jarring element Mo could see was a large, framed print of Munch's
The Scream
over the bed.

Heather was seated at a table in the alcove, bent over and writing studiously with a pen. She was wearing jeans and a gray sweatshirt. Though he couldn't see her face, Mo remembered the photo of her with her family, the straight blond hair, surprised eyes and loose, thick lips.

"Heather, this is the man I said would be coming—Mr. Ford."

Heather didn't lift her head or stop writing. "He's been here for an hour already. What were you doing, prepping him for me?"

"I wanted to talk to your mother about various things," Mo said.

"You can go now, Mom," Heather said, still not looking up.

Mrs. Mason glanced at Mo.
You see what I mean,
her eyes said. 'I'd like you to be polite to Mr. Ford. He thinks you may be able to help him. Don't forget, we need to be ready to go by one o'clock. And I want you to eat some lunch before we go." She went to the door, where she paused as if she had more to say, then turned down the hall.

Mo waited for Heather to say something. Through the windows of the alcove, he could see that the sky outside had cleared and a bright sun shone down into the backyard. With the sun had come a wind, tossing the tattered oak leaves that still clung to the trees. He looked around the room for a moment, then back at Heather. She still had not lifted her head; all Mo could see was the curtain of her hair, almost touching the spiral notebook she was writing in.

"What are you writing?" he said at last.

"A story."

"Oh yeah? What's it about?"

"It's sort of a detective story."

"Ah. What kind of a detective story?"

Heather jotted another line. "It's about a detective who comes to talk to a schizophrenic girl."

Mo stopped, feeling out of his depth. She was playing with him. He had been with her three minutes and had already lost control of the interview.

When he didn't answer, Heather looked up for the first time. She had pale skin, a child's face. She hardly looked fourteen, more like ten or eleven, Mo decided, with her skinny legs, narrow shoulders, undeve- loped chest. The loose and unguarded look of her mouth was made more awkward by the braces on her teeth. Only her eyes looked older.

"Don't you want to know what happens?"

"Okay. What happens?"

Heather smiled coquettishly at him. "I'm not going to tell you. You have to guess."

It would be useless to humor her or condescend to her, Mo decided. Better to challenge her, throw her off balance, take a gamble. "Fine." He cleared his throat, put his hands in his jacket pockets, and paced while he talked: "I'd guess it's about a schizophrenic girl whose older brother is in love with a girl, a girl who's a friend of the schizophrenic and is almost her age. The brother often takes his sister with him when he goes out with the other girl because neither the brother nor the other girl want anyone to know they're hanging out together. Am I warm?"

Heather's eyes had narrowed. "I don't like you," she said.

"Sometimes the three of them go out when everybody thinks the other girl is visiting the schizophrenic girl. But other times they go out when nobody knows, and they bring the schizophrenic girl along so she's not alone at the house, or in case any of the parents find out."