Skull Session (32 page)

"You've been a lot of help," Mo said. "This is my card. I'll want to talk to you again."

"Anytime," Falcone said flatly.

It was two-thirty by the time Mo made it back to his office. He checked his messages and found only one, a short, harried-sounding message from Bennett Quinn: "On the thigh, we've got nothing, nobody, and no leads yet. Lot of help, huh? We're having a little task force meeting in a few days, and the thigh's on the agenda. I'll keep you informed."

He sat at his desk and jotted a few notes. Beyond establishing that Falcone was a tank and had some anger in him, the interview hadn't revealed anything definitive—if what Paul and Lia had told him was true, a lot of people had something against Mrs. Hoffmann. On the other hand, he'd accomplished one of his objectives: He'd given the bodybuilder fair warning that he was under some suspicion. If Falcone had been taking out his anger by smashing up Highwood, he'd think twice about returning. Lia and Paul would maybe be a little safer. If Falcone got nervous and tried to disappear, Mo would have a suspect.

He was about to go get a cup of coffee when the telephone rang.

"Detective Ford? Dr. Mathewson from the lab in Vallhalla. I'm returning your call." The doctor's voice was breathy, thin, an unhealthy sound. Mo hadn't met him, but he had his suspicions of anyone who wanted to make a career of forensic pathology. His voice didn't help: Mo had to overcome his mental picture of him as hunched, pale, bug-eyed.

"I'm hoping you might be able to help me. I'm working on a case that may have connections with a hit-and-run from this area. I understand you did the autopsy. A Richard Mason, killed August sixth, in Lewisboro. Young man hit by two separate cars?"

"Oh, yes! I remember that one. You don't often see such a, uh, such an extreme case."

"Let me start by asking a general question. Is there a signature to vehicle-inflicted injuries? I mean, can you teller
sure
an injury is caused by a vehicle?"

"The range of vehicle injuries is very broad—penetrating injuries, crushing, acceleration-deceleration injuries, secondary-impact injuries, flying-object injuries. The forces are tremendous and unpredictable. Someone can be effectively
kneaded,
like dough. So it's hard to say. When I get a body, the coroner has already made a determination of cause of death, after looking at the scene and a preliminary medical report. Unless I find something that directly contradicts the coroner's report, his determination stands."

Mo made a note on his pad:
forces unpredictable, wide range injuries.
"If someone had brought you this boy and not told you it was vehicular, what would you have said? Based only on the condition of the corpse?"

"Vehicle," the doctor said unhesitatingly. "That or an accident involving industrial machinery. I'd prefer the latter, actually, but then the death would have had to happen elsewhere and the body get transported. But if that were the case, there wouldn't have been so much blood at the scene. I seem to recall that all the blood was accounted for."

Mo made a note on his pad,
poss. industrial machinery,
then scratched his head, beginning to feel like an idiot. "One more question, Doctor. Can you think of any other way that level of damage could have occurred to a strong, healthy young man?"

Mathewson said nothing for a moment. Mo could hear his breathing, close to the telephone mouthpiece. "Sure," the doctor said at last. "He picked a fight with the Incredible Hulk. Or maybe Superman." He wheezed a breathy laugh. "Sorry. Not a subject to joke about. Really, I can't think of anything at all. Is there anything else I can help you with, Detective?"

Mo made a note on the pad, said good-bye, and hung up. Then he sat for a long time, thinking, staring at what he'd just written:
Superman.

40

P
AUL KICKED OPEN THE kitchen door as the phone rang again. Two A.M., Saturday morning. He'd had it with riddles and mysteries. If someone wanted to hassle them, they'd better be ready to get hassled back. He crossed the ravaged kitchen and yanked the receiver off the hook.

"Hello?" he barked.

There was silence at the other end.

"Hello, who is this?"

"Dad?" a small voice asked.

"Mark! Where are you? Is everything all right?"

"Yeah, everything's okay. I'm home. You sounded mad when you answered."

"Well, I didn't know who it was. I thought it might be some weirdo or something, calling so late. What are you doing up at this ungodly hour?"

"I snuck down to call you." Mark was almost whispering. There were so many questions to ask all at once. "Snuck? You can call me anytime, you know that."

"Oh, I don't know. Mom doesn't like me to talk to you."

"Did she say that?"

"No. I can just tell."

"Well, you call me anyway. You call me any time, day or night. I mean it."

"Yeah."

"Mark," Paul said softly, "was that you who called before? Late, hke this?"

"Yeah."

"So it must be something important."

"I just needed to talk to you. I miss you."

"I miss you too. Really badly. I'm sorry I've had to be down here."

Mark took a breath. "Mom doesn't understand me very well."

"You mean in general, or you mean the problem?"

"I guess mainly the problem. Both. I don't know."

"Has it been bad recently?"

"It's like it's always there, I have to fight it off. I feel like there's, like an
animal
in my head. I get scared that there's something the matter with me that can't be fixed. That something bad will happen to me."

The small, tired voice coming over the line broke Paul's heart. "Mark, nothing bad is going to happen to you. I'll come back tomorrow. Will that help?"

"Yes."

"In the meantime, you tell Mom about what you're feeling. I think she'll understand better than you think. Mom is very smart, and she loves you just as much as I do. Promise you'll tell her what you told me."

Mark hesitated, as if thinking it over. "Okay. But only if you promise you won't tell Mom I called you."

"Why shouldn't I tell her?"

"She'll be mad that I snuck down."

"She'll get over it," Paul said, more harshly than he intended.

Mark paused. "But her feelings will be hurt. That I said she doesn't know how to help as well as you do. That I thought I had to sneak. You have to promise me you won't tell her."

As worried as he was, he was still trying to protect his mother's well-being. It was this concern for Janet that lay behind the midnight calls:
Mark didn't want to worry her.
Paul loved his son almost intolerably at that moment. The distance between them was agony.

"All right, I promise. I won't tell her," Paul said. "Okay? Now you go to bed. Just be sure to talk to Mom, and keep on fighting it, and tell yourself that everything's going to be all right. Because it is. And I'll be back to see you soon."

He stumped back to the carriage house.
Everything's going to be all right,
he sang to himself.
Everything's all right. Right.

Lia got into the Subaru and started it, then rolled down the window and looked up at him. "Can I ask a favor?" she said. Saturday morning: She was on her way back to Vermont. During the night, the clear weather had given way to an overcast that threatened snow or freezing rain, and she wanted to get on the road before driving conditions got dangerous.

"Could I ever refuse you anything?"

"You," she said, "you have this way of turning everything into a struggle of, of positively
earth-shaking
scope. It's good versus evil, light versus dark, reason versus whatever. You seem to
distill
everything to some essential question of values. And this is part of what makes you such a good person, and I love it about you." She reached up and cupped his cheek in her warm palm. "But I wish you could see things more the way I do. For me, the situation here or with Mark and so on, they're just specific and pragmatic problems and opportunities. They can be handled if you take them one at a time and don't blow them up into bigger issues. Taking on evil itself is a pretty big job, but dealing firmly and successfully with, say, Janet, is more manageable. Right? This is one of the most important things I've learned from scaring the shit out of myself, Paul. Just focus on the job at hand, on your equipment, on your own preparedness. Don't go all abstract and grandiose. Otherwise it will kill you."

She looked at him very seriously, and he wondered just what level of favor this was. Was this just good advice from your loved one? Or was it a more dire species of communication, a help-save-our-relationship request?

"Okay," was all he could say.

Paul watched her pull away, wishing that there was time to talk, wishing they could drive together, concerned for her safety. The clouds had lowered until the tops of the bare trees up slope were being erased by trailing strands of mist, and now a fine rain drifted down, freezing on the ground, promising tricky driving. Not wanting to scrape later, he took the precaution of backing the MG into the carriage house's garage bay and shutting the doors. If Albert Martin didn't come to install the gate this morning, he'd have to get a chain to string between the pillars while he went back to Vermont. The situation with Janet and Mark couldn't wait.

On Friday they'd spent an hour digging in the biggest drifts of debris, looking for the corpses that on Thursday night they'd been convinced filled the house. There'd been some relief in not finding any, and they'd all put in a hard day's work, Dempsey coming and going with the windows, Cohen and his nephew working like miners in the basement. A productive day: They'd begun to see progress in the library. Paul had explained to the crew that he and Lia would need to return to Vermont, himself until Tuesday, Lia a day longer, and they made arrangements for Dempsey and Cohen to get a key from Albert if he did manage to install the gate. Lia and he stayed up until after midnight, working until their eyes blurred. Then Mark's phone call.

After putting away the MG, Paul made a call to Albert Martin's garage to see if he was still on track with the gate. Albert answered breathlessly on the first ring.

"I'm pinned down here at the station," Albert said. "Pump attendant called in sick on me. Still hoping to get there today. Maybe by two, three o'clock. Sorry!"

By noon he'd sorted four more boxes of papers. After a quick lunch of canned beans, he filled another box and took it to the smoking room. The first page he picked up, a wrinkled onionskin half-covered with single-spaced typing, was a letter from Ben to Vivien, signecj with Ben's confident, looping signature. He pawed quickly through the rest of the box. At a glance, he could see many pages of similarly typed text among the jumbled papers.

He read several. One early letter concerned Ben's work on his Jefferson biography, the ups and downs of his research. Another discussed Philippine history, the role of the United States at the turn of the century.

There was a vividness to Ben's letters: Ben Skoglund, professor of history, student of philosophy, and amateur rock climber, biographer of Jefferson and champion of the Enlightenment, of Reason, of Human ism. Of facing into it. His confidence, if you could forget the way he ended, was inspiring.

Paul put the handful of letters aside and rummaged again in the box.

Dearest Vivien,

Not to burden you with my worries . . .but I don't feel I can trouble Aster
any more than I already have. Perhaps because you have confided in me, I feel
I can confess my worries about Paulie.

He is an exceptionally bright boy, with a precious instrument in that little
head of his. And yet this fine intelligence is held in check by one terrible
obstruction after another. Just when we have begun to get control of his first
problem, some new, equally mysterious demon has reared its head. And as
before the quacks cannot agree on a name for it, a cause or a cure. I say hang
them all for the charlatans they are.

My outrage this evening is directed at the most recent specialist I consulted,
highly recommended, who has at last issued his august diagnosis: congenital
choreoathetosis. Congenital choreoathetosis! When I challenged this opinion,
he looked quite offended.
⁽
Are you a medical doctor, sir?" he asked me.
Naturally, I've refused to pay his fee.

So, yet another in the ongoing series of idiotic misdiagnoses. I remain more
convinced than ever that the solution to this mystery falls to me, to my own
ingenuity and research. In the meantime, Paulie is becoming conscious that he
is an "oddball." I worry that this will shape his sense of himself in unfortunate
ways. My dear, difficult, marvelous, strange son.

In any case, I take some comfort that you are familiar with how painfully
concerned a parent can be. There are times when I fear I will be overcome with
anguish
—
if anything could strike me down, it is this. I'm more grateful than
you know for your understanding.

My love to you,

Ben

Paul felt a familiar stab in his own heart. Ben really cared about his son. As Paul cared about Mark. He felt the building pressure behind his eyes, the overflowing well of sorrow, guilt, and confusion. Ben hovered in his memory, taking on dimension.

He had just reached for the box again when he heard a muffled thump from the direction of the kitchen. Ice tingled in his veins. Immediately another noise came, closer, something crunching in the main room. As of a piece of china underfoot.

Someone was in the house.

Not Albert—he'd been at the garage less than ten minutes ago, he couldn't have driven from Somers in that time. Paul listened anxiously, ears straining against the rush of blood hissing in his ears, and thought he heard small rustles or scrapes, fading away. Without thinking, he looked around the room for a weapon. A primal impulse: find something for the hands to wield. He backed toward the hearth and lifted the poker from the rack of fireplace tools. It had a good weight to it, a solid iron point and hook.

Akatheeesia!
his brain screamed. He bit his tongue to keep it silent.

He walked stealthily to the door, listened, then slowly swung it open. The big hall was dimly lit, and through the door opposite the smoking room he could see through the dining room all the way into the kitchen. Where the outside door stood open, a blue rectangle of forest hanging in the dark.

No one was in the big room. He was disappointed. Part of him had hoped it might be Dempsey, come back for a tool he'd forgotten.
Or,
he thought, suddenly certain,
for whatever other purpose Dempsey had going.

Holding the poker in both hands, he walked quietly into the middle of the room, staying in the lane he'd shoveled clear of debris. For a time he stood listening, hearing nothing. Then he heard another muffled thump, a small cracking noise. From upstairs.

Paul bit his tongue harder, shrugged to loosen the clench of tension in his shoulders, and walked carefully up the littered stairs. At the top, he paused on the balcony to listen again. A rustling came from across the big open space—from Vivien's room. He walked swiftly around the balcony, the poker ready, watching the doorway to the bedroom. The first shaky rush of adrenaline had worn off, replaced by a state of taut alertness, cautious yet purposeful. And, surprisingly, a feeling of elation in the clarity and simplicity of it:
Don't fuck with me.

As he came along the cluttered balcony, his foot grazed a tall silver cup, a trophy of some sort, which spun away and clattered against the balcony railing. He stopped and waited, his heart jarring against his ribs.

No more noise from Vivien's bedroom.

And then a shape leapt out of the doorway, a looming black silhouette against the muted light from the window. Paul drew back the poker, and instantly the broad-shouldered shape did the same thing, pulling back a bat-size leg of some piece of furniture.

It was Royce.

"Good Christ, cousin! You look like you're ready to kill someone. Who in hell were you expecting?" Royce lowered his weapon.

"I didn't hear anyone come up," Paul said. Royce must have arrived while he'd been in the library, gathering another box of papers.

"Drove right up. Car's right out front. Would have knocked, but it didn't seem as if anyone was here." Royce tossed down his club, dusted his hands against each other.