Skull Session (30 page)

A humid, hickory smell in the air. Out in the woods with the big dog. Mother
packed a snack, a sandwich and a whole Cracker Jack box, all wrapped in the
special blue handkerchief. The woods strange with the bright uneven light, the
mist. Vivien gone to town in her Land Rover car that smells like leather inside.

The house feels empty without Father, who had work to do, and without Freda
who is gone away forever but you're not supposed to talk about it because it makes
Vivien too sad.

Resting on the bare granite boulder, watching ants, then staring upward. The
rough rock gives off heat like some big friendly living thing. The deep sky is hung
with little puffs of clouds like Indian smoke signals, their meaning mysterious.
Movingfarther on. A flock of startled crows rises and spirals in the air like ashes
from afire, then blows away into the valley. Then the dog stops to perk his ears,
uncertain. A chugging noise, down below in the thick tangle of vines and
brambles. Scared now but going closer, hearing the thrash of dried leaves, crackle of
twigs. Something's moving behind a ledge of rock, then out again, in and out,
back and forth, a white-pink shape, two pink shapes, wrong against the woods
colors. A sapling-top jerks suddenly, then stops, then thrashes again, shaking
loose a scatter of leaves. Backing away, afraid to run, starting to turn. Tripping
over something, dropping the bag with the snack in it, wanting to go back for the
handkerchief but too afraid. Can't look. The horrible convulsive back and forth,
the hissing-chugging, the pink and red and black. The awful blind energy of it,
like animals fighting. Running away now but still hearing it, the fast rhythmic
noise like a knife being sharpened. A bad secret thing that you don't talk about.
Running, scrabbling away. Looking back in terror, seeing the top of the sapling
heave and thrash and shiver loose its leaves.

38

M
O SAT AT his desk, his office dark but for the desk lamp and the glow of his computer screen. Coming in after normal office hours, he had spotted Tommy Mack in the main office, talking on the phone and intently chewing his nails, but otherwise the BCI side was empty. He had come away from his meeting with Lia and Paul so full of jangled ju-ju energy he could hardly contain himself. Partly it was the possibilities that emerged from what they'd told him. Partly it was Lia. Trying to name the feeling, he discarded
excited
in favor of
inspired.
He felt like an idiot, a kid. He wanted to show off for her, bring her presents—which meant, in this case, to develop the leads they'd offered him.

But first one little errand. Apollonian or Dionysian? she'd asked. The answer was both complex and simple: a cop, Lia, suspicious by nature, paranoid through experience. Sorry, folks, just a precaution. At his computer, he called up NYSPIN and punched in the names Paul Skoglund and Lia McLean. No arrest records or warrants, not even a moving violation. Okay. Next he typed in a vehicle registration request, using the car license numbers he'd made a point of noting before leaving the driveway at Highwood. The old MG was indeed registered to a Paul Skoglund, of Norwich, Vermont, the Subaru wagon to one Lia McLean, same address. Finally, he called the Providence police and was able to confirm that Ed McLean was an investigator in the department—a lieutenant, in fact. So they were what they appeared to be.

Next he called the number Paul had given him for his aunt in San Francisco. As he'd promised, he didn't mention that he'd been to the lodge or had met Paul, only that he was working on a case involving missing teenagers and the lodge seemed to figure in.

"I understand that the premises have been badly vandalized. What I'd like, ma'am, is your permission to conduct a forensic investigation of the house to see if the teenagers in question had been up there at any time."

The woman's voice was brittle, icy. "I presume that your request for a consent search means that you are unable to convince a judge that your suspicions merit issuing a search warrant. Am I correct?"

She didn't leave much wiggle room. "That's essentially true, Mrs. Hoffmann, but only because I'm in the preliminary stages—"

"Mr. Ford. Please don't waste your breath. You have offered me no persuasive reason to permit my house to be invaded, during my absence, and my things tossed about yet again. I'm afraid I have standards of privacy at least as high as the local courts. If and when you are able to obtain a search warrant, I will of course be happy to comply. Until then, I am sorry. You may not enter my property without legal authorization."

Mo felt hke telling her that if he got a warrant he'd search the house whether she was happy to comply or not. But this was the kind of tough old rich buzzard who knew how to make major trouble for you. He'd avoid confrontation with her for now. He thanked her for talking with him and said good-bye. Cross that possibility off the list.

The next phase of this night's work was more complex. A wild thought had occurred to him, prompted by the sight of that sink lodged in the wall. He hadn't been willing to mention the thought to Lia and Paul, not without a hell of a lot more to back it up.

Mo opened his file on the hit-and-run death of Richard Mason. For the first time, he spilled the photos out on his desk. He took a deep breath, then pulled over the swing-arm desk lamp so the photos were spotlighted against his blotter.

Ten black-and-whites, a dozen color shots, all eight-by-tens. The body of Richard Mason was caught in its final pose on the asphalt of Highway 138, brightly lit by arc lamps. In one mid-range shot, his blood-slimed face—or rather the remains of it, since part of the skull was missing—was against the road surface, almost upside down on an unnaturally elongated neck. He'd ended up wearing his abdominal organs like a ghasdy cape over his shoulders. Another shot showed the corpse from behind, with the bloodied shirt stretched empty on the pavement, still partly tucked into the waistband of the blue jeans he'd been wearing.

Mo looked away, covering the photos with a blank legal pad as if to protect himself from their noxious emanations. He wasn't an expert at forensic pathology, so he didn't expect to pick up anything but a general sense of the accident from the photos. An
intuitive
sense. Once he'd gotten his breath again, he looked at a few more photos. There was one of the initial impact site, where Richard's right lower leg lay in a broad smear of dried blood. Another gave a good view of the ninety-foot trail between the initial impact site and the body, a tangled calligraphy of blood, pieces of cloth, and unnameable lumps.

In just the few minutes he'd been looking at the photos, he'd gotten a throbbing headache, and the light felt like a dagger driven into his eyes. Mo put the photos away and oriented the light away from him. He lifted out the accident scene report, read the reconstructionist's report carefully.

Bernie Denning had received specialized training to be able to look closely at a vehicular incident, especially a vehicle-pedestrian collision, and reconstruct the sequence of events. Using his own observations at the scene, the M.E.'s medical report, photos, charts, computer analysis, and Betty Rosen's testimony, Denning had put together a picture of what had happened. Victim hit by at least two vehicles. Second vehicle known to be a Ford Taurus station wagon, which had rolled Pdchard's body beneath its undercarriage, causing innumerable fractures of bones and detaching various body parts. Embedded in the corpse were chips of rust, some mud and oil residue, all found to have belonged to the Taurus. Patterns of tissue residue on the Taurus's oil pan, floorboards, and both left wheel wells told the story of the body's passage beneath it, consistent with the driver's account. Comparative absence of blood at the second site resulted from the fact that the corpse had drained at the first impact site, where it had lain for less than half an hour.

Accurate reconstruction extremely difficult due to double impact and extremity of injuries.

Denning had found the absence of indications about the nature of the first vehicle to be unusual, although not without precedent. In his view, the lack of mud, rust, or oil suggested that the vehicle in question had been new. Given the absence of paint, plastic, or glass, the victim had probably not been struck by a grill, hood, or fender; it was possible that he'd been horizontal when first hit, or had thrown himself under the vehicle. Denning felt that the only vehicle that could have accomplished such extreme damage was a truck with tandem axles and double wheels or, possibly, a piece of road construction equipment.

Denning's conclusion, a best guess, was that Pdchard had been knocked down by a tall, wide tire and then "processed" by multiple wheels which churned him up and under in an exceptionally clean wheel well, either brand-new or recently washed. The most problematic aspect of the whole thing had been the absence of tire tracks from the first vehicle. In his summary, however, Denning cited a similar case near Buffalo, in which the badly damaged corpse of a woman had puzzled investigators until a guilt-ridden local grading contractor had come forward with his brand-new front-loader.

What if
Mo thought,
what if.
What if there's a connection between the anomalous damage at Highwood and an equally anomalous vehicular homicide only a mile or so away? The extreme violence both required. The extreme force.

Okay, what if? Maybe there was a way to explore the idea further, see what other criminal anomalies the human zoo had produced recently. Every violent crime in the country was recorded in the FBI's Violent Criminal Apprehension Program computer database and analysis program, which he could access as a State Police investigator. VICAP described each crime by 189 separate lines of information, each line of which could then be compared and cross-referenced with other crimes. New York State had created an additional section, called Homicide Assessment Lead Tracking, with another thirty-nine lines of information. Using HALT-VICAP, an investigator looking for leads could search out possible links between his case and similar crimes, criminals, M.O.s, or victims nationwide.

He pulled a search request form from his file drawer, looked it over, slapped it back onto the desk. Ordinarily, he'd fill out the forms and send them to Albany, where the HALT information would be processed, and then HALT would forward the rest to the VICAP people in Quantico. Results could take days or weeks. Not good enough.

Mo flipped his Rolodex, dialed a number at FBI headquarters. Jane and he had met at a VICAP conference in Washington, had gone out looking for a decent meal and gotten soaked by a thunderstorm, and had ended up in bed at his hotel room. Just the once, they'd both agreed afterward: She was married. They'd agreed to forget all about it, but that small, secret tenderness remained in their rare professional contacts. They did each other work favors now and again.

Mo expected to leave a message on her voice mail but wasn't really surprised when she answered in person: Jane was working late again, a habit that Mo had decided reflected equally on her professional commitment and the health of her marriage. Without going into details, he explained his need to expedite a VICAP search request.

"Just how expeditiously do you want me to handle this, roughly?"

"Roughly, to run it through and fax it to me tonight."

"Like I've got nothing else to do, right?" Jane said. "Must be a good one. I think I can do that, Mo. But don't tell anyone I do favors, okay?" The smile in her voice served as a faint reminder of their shared secret. Janie was a good kid.

"This one is simple," Mo told her. "We'll just do sections six, seven, and eight. Skip the rest." The sections he listed were titled "Offense M.O.," "Condition of Victim When Found," and "Cause of Death or Trauma." Mo looked over the form and read out the boxes he'd checked as Jane made out a duplicate form at her end, naming descriptors that he hoped to match with other crimes: extreme violence, dismemberment, indications of extreme force, perpetrators with great physical strength.

"Jesus, Mo! I thought they already caught King Kong. What've you got going up there?"

"Janie, if I knew I wouldn't be bothering you with this."

"Okay. I'll get to work. As long as you're sufficiently appreciative."

"You knowr I am," he said, meaning it in the same several ways she intended the question. Though she'd said little about her marriage, the bony, sweet, shy, sexy woman he'd spent that lunch hour with had needed affirmation more than gratification. Much as he had.

Mo got himself dinner from the vending machines in the hall, microwaved a plastic-wrapped meatball sandwich, worked on some other projects, then gave up and paced and watched the fax machine. At last it began to spit out pages.

At his request, Jane had sent him reports on just eastern region cases, a couple of dozen records of crimes that had matches with the line descriptions he'd given her. The first was a sordid account of a son's chainsaw attack on his father in Strafford, Vermont. The attack had been witnessed by neighbors, the case closed by the arrest of the son. From the narrative section, he was able to determine that the chainsaw left a unique "signature" on the bones and flesh of the victim. Did a vehicle leave such a signature—an
unmistakable
signature? Mo made a note on a scratch pad,
Ask M.E. about automotive signature.

It made for a gory night's reading, but in all the reports where extreme violence or dismemberment had occurred, the weapon or means was clear, and most were closed by arrest. After automobiles, it was die-stamping machinery and farm equipment that seemed to be the most popular means for inflicting massive injuries upon someone you didn't like. An industrial bandsaw was the weapon of choice in one incident at a factory in New Jersey; there was even a multiple-victim
steamroller
situation in North Carolina. None had even the remotest possible bearing on Richard Mason or the business at Highwood.

The best Mo could do was a report of a detached human thigh that had been found in the woods near Highway 102 outside of Ridgefield, Connecticut, a few weeks earlier. No identifying marks; victim unknown but indicated by lab tests to be female and around age thirty; thigh
ripped
off the body, and lower leg separated, by means unknown. A search of the surrounding area had not turned up anything, and no thirtyish female from the area was known to be missing. Mo jotted down the file numbers and the name of the agent in charge.