Skull Session (8 page)

Paul slowed for the turn onto 91 north, the lights of Hartford slanting through the windows and casting trapezoids that slid over Lia's motionless form.

His thoughts spun in big slow circles, spiraling in on the letter from Ben, still folded in his shirt pocket. The voice in the letter was absolutely Ben, yet so different from the man he usually recalled. The Ben in the letter seemed almost mischievous,
playful,
but the man he remembered was so often urging restraint. It would be nice to know which was the real one. For that matter, it would also be nice to know why the real one had chosen to jump off the cliff at Break Neck, to break apart not only his own body but his family as well, on the rocks below. Aster gave up on her career as a journalist, drank, became embittered and isolated. Kay sought refuge in a sort of deliberate amnesia, the calculated normalcy of middle-class life. And Paul himself, with his various sad and secret wounds. What malaise of the spirit caused Ben to bequeath such a legacy? In Paul's darker moments, he wondered whether he might have inherited the same worm in his soul.

After Springfield the traffic died down and there was just the dark highway, the speeding white and yellow dots swarming toward him, mesmerizing, like tracers fired from a machine gun in the darkness ahead.

He had all the reasons to do the job, yet he still felt a reservation. What was the problem? It was a nice place. He could remember it vividly.

Looking back at the long high bulk of the house, deep in the shadows of big
trees. Dark shingle walls, stained slate roof, white-trimmed windows. In the
garden, the marble cupids' disingenuous gazes.

Running in the cool high woods. Vivien's big white sheepdog runs alongside.
Sun through the treetops, straight beams in slightly misted air. Upthrust granite
shelves covered with intricate embroidery of moss and lichen in greens and grays.
The dog ranges, snuffles, glances back with his friendly toothy smile. Brambles
and ravines. Birds swoop in the lattice of branches. Past the spooky dark under a
massive overgrown rock shelf, a little scared, then into the sun again. Sitting
resting on a boulder, feeling the dutiful deep heartbeat slowing, calming. The big
dog scratches his ears with a hind leg, then licks his pink incongruous penis.

Moving on, deeper, moist mossy ground squelches in the low places, gnarled
birch roots grip elephant-skinned boulders. Stands of white birch in bright contrast
to the backgroundforest gloom. Dog sees something ahead, whines uneasily, ears
perked. Chill tingle of fear, feeling suddenly alone and too far from the
house
— Paul was startled alert when Lia spoke, the thick voice of someone just awakened. He had been so deep in memory he was almost asleep.

"Something that occurred to me," Lia said. "It seems strange that Vivien just left everything. You'd think she'd have taken more of her personal things with her, or put them in storage or something. Ask the neighbors to look after the place—" Lia yawned hugely. "You'd think she'd take better care of her property." She burrowed down into the swell of her jacket.

Paul waited for her to say more, but she had drowsed off again. She was right. Vivien's abrupt departure was strange—yet another anomaly about Highwood. Yes, one of several strangenesses. He thought back on the times he'd installed furnaces, and how hard it could be to cut that old heavy-gauge galvanized steel, and of the weight of the furnace oil pump he'd hoisted in the basement at Highwood. There was the heavy marble mantelpiece in Vivien's room too, ripped out of the fireplace masonry. The bureau thrown out the window. The smashed piano he'd spotted in Royce's old room—even the cast iron, trussed string harp had been broken.

Something tugged at his memory, something not from the distant past but from recent times. Maybe about Mark? Too tired. The thread of thought evaded him. It was connected to another realization that had been growing on him:
Whoever did it was one strong son of a bitch.

8

M
ORGAN FORD PARKED HIS CAR, shut off the ignition, and paused to massage his eyes. It was 8:05 A.M. Starting a day's work always brought on a moment of extreme fatigue that he had to overcome before he could open the car door, grab his briefcase, and head into the one-story, pseudo-colonial brick building that housed the New York State Police barracks at Lewisboro.

It was Thursday and felt like it. The fatigue was his body's rebellion against facing another day of his job as investigator for the Bureau of Criminal Investigation. This stemmed in part from working in an environment where he was the new boy on the block, low man on the totem pole, preceded by the fucked-up reputation he'd gained at White Plains. But mostly the exhaustion originated internally. He wasn't certain that this job was doable, that he really had the stuff for it, or that this was what he ought to be doing with his life. Every day at this hour he thought the same thought: Maybe he should talk to his doctor. He was thirty-five years old, a regular exerciser, nonsmoker, moderate drinker. He shouldn't feel this bad every day.

He went down the hallway to his so-called office and spotted what appeared to be a conference in the BCI senior investigator's office at the end of the hall—Barrett, Tommy Mack, Joe Matarini, Sue Trenton. He was glad to get his door open and slip inside without anyone noticing him. All he wanted was to get started on his work without encountering, too early, any of the other BCI staff, especially not his supervisor, Frank Barrett. Barrett was in his mid-fifties, with heavy jowls and a thick middle, a face as drooping and lugubrious as a basset hound's. Mo didn't need to look at those pouched eyes this early in the day.

His office was commensurate with his status: not good. He'd come on the job a month earlier, replacing Detective William Avery, who had reached sixty and retired without burning out, getting shot, or drinking himself to death, although he'd apparently given that a good try. The barracks nickname Wild Bill was intended ironically. He had a bland face, thinning reddish hair, a drinker's veined nose. He'd avoided getting killed on the job by not pushing anything too hard. Especially in the last few months before his retirement, he'd nursed his cases along at a leisurely tempo, basically killing time until the buzzer went off, he took his ceremonial retirement badge from the Police Benevolent Association, and went home.

They'd worked together for two weeks in the transition, Avery explaining the cases Mo would inherit, walking him through his files. Maybe Avery's golden-years-on-the-force aura had protected Mo during the transition period, and the staff had seemed friendly enough at first. But once he was gone, things changed. Mo got Wild Bill's files but not his desk in the main office, which faced windows overlooking a nice view of fields, woods, the hills across the valley. The day after Avery's farewell dinner, they'd begun installation of some new heating and plumbing in the ceiling over that half of the main room, and Mo's desk had been "temporarily" relocated into a tiny utility room with one narrow window opening onto a view of whatever vehicle had parked in front of it. Being isolated from the others suited Mo's disposition but was probably bad managerial planning by Barrett. His banishment coincided with the changing tone of his exchanges with his fellows in the two weeks since Avery left, the snatches of overheard conversations alluding to his problems at White Plains. Now people seemed to approach him with either a chill or, worse, a smug sort of sympathy.

Mo listened to his voice mail, opened his calendar for the day. He was supposed to meet with Barrett at eleven and had several interviews scheduled for the afternoon, dealing with the missing kid thing, one of the cases Wild Bill had been coasting on for the last three months. This promised to be at least marginally interesting, unlike most of the cases he'd been given, which concerned crap like burglary, a small-time car theft ring, a hit-and-run vehicular homicide with absolutely no leads, and so on. He spent an hour reviewing case files, jotting some notes, and by the time he was done felt up to encountering his colleagues.

The conference in Barrett's office had ended. Mo could see Barrett at his desk with his half-lens glasses on, reading from a thick sheaf of papers. He passed by the doorway without being noticed and turned into the main office, where the other BCI staff maintained desks in half-wall cubicles and where two civilian secretaries worked at their computer terminals. Mo got himself a cup of coffee, then paused at his mailbox. He separated the junk mail into the recycling bins.

Louise, one of the secretaries, returned to her desk and sat down.

"How are you today, Mo?" she asked.

"I'm as good as can be expected under the circumstances, which could be better and could be worse," he said. "How about yourself?"

"Same." She stood up partway and raised the lever on her hydraulic chair so that the seat came up under her, then pulled her skirt under her thighs and sat back down. "I think the shock absorber on this thing leaks," she complained.

Mo opened a piece of mail and pretended to read it, watching Louise settle herself. When he'd first come into the office, he'd done the single man's offhand inventory of the female staff. With the exception of Louise, the women were ten or fifteen years older than he was, a rather colorless bunch. Grasping at straws, he'd entertained speculation about Louise for a few days because she was about his age and had a graceful if extremely slender figure. At first, the very plainness of the clothes she wore—slim-fitting, gray wool skirts, white long-sleeved blouses, sometimes with a pastel sweater thrown over her shoulders, low-heeled black shoes—had seemed to set off the sensual grace of her curves. She had a languid quality about her that had struck him as sexy too: the way she'd pause at her typing, tilt her chin back and roll her head to one side to work out neck tension, or would push her dark hair back from her forehead not with her fingers but with the back of her bent wrist.

But after a few days he'd decided that she was just a slightly anorexic woman with chronic hypoglycemia. She handled her work with only moderate competence, and during breaks had been working her way through
The Bridges of Madison County
ever since he'd arrived. Though he could still appreciate the wan sweetness of the shape of her hips, he had realized that she was neither particularly sexy nor particularly interesting. Nor particularly interested. It was now over a year since his divorce from Dara, and he'd faced into his longing for another relationship. But after only a week at the new job he'd had to accept that if he were looking for love, he wasn't going to find it at the Lewisboro State Police barracks.

"Mo." He was startled out of his thoughts by a deep voice immediately behind him. He turned to see Barrett, glasses in hand, blue eyes staring out at him from the layered bags around them. "I've got a few minutes now," Barrett said. "You want to make our eleven o'clock a little early?"

Mo followed Barrett to his office, where the senior investigator sat on the edge of his desk and Mo took one of the plump vinyl-upholstered chairs. Barrett's office had a nice view of scrub sumac trees, a deep dried-blood purple, and above them a series of folds of pleasant brown fields interspersed with woods. The white rectangles of a new subdivision were scattered on the farthest hill, looking like spilled ice cubes.

"So," Barrett began, putting on his glasses again. "We're just basically checking in, I guess." He looked at Mo over the glasses, a piercing glance as if Mo's response would be deeply revealing.

"Yes."

"Well, generalities first. The office working well? Copier code working?"

"Everything's fine. I'm still sorting out the"—Mo paused, about to say
shitheap,
then thinking better of it—"files that Avery left me."

"Wild Bill was tired out, wasn't he? I'll buy that he didn't keep a tidy house. How bad is it?"

Mo wasn't sure how revered Wild Bill's memory was with Barrett, but he felt compelled to be at least marginally truthful. "Pretty bad. The main problem is that he didn't do a lot of legwork for the last few months. There are a lot of leads he didn't follow up on."

This was an understatement. Wild Bill's inattention had bordered on nonfeasance. He'd done a pretty good job with everything you could do over the phone, but he hadn't gone into the field enough. In the case of the missing kids, Wild Bill had contacted missing persons agencies, juvenile detention centers, family resource agencies around the state and the country; he'd called relatives and checked with cheap hotels in the city, the FBI, other police departments, morgues and hospitals within a couple of hundred miles. But when none of these efforts had turned up any sign of them, he hadn't gone and talked to their buddies, their girlfriends, the local drug dealers, the liquor store owners. Mo could see why: It would be hard to visualize old Wild Bill, with his bland, pleasant, over-the-hill face and big soft body, making much headway with paranoid teenagers.

The pattern of his last few months' work was plain: If it could be done with the telephone propped between ear and shoulder, size twelves on the desk, he did it. If it meant driving all over Westchester County in the lousy weather they'd had this fall, he didn't get around to it. That left a lot of this sort of work for Mo. Which he didn't mind—he'd rather be out talking to the citizenry than shuffling papers in his office, getting the chill from his colleagues.

Mo told Barrett some of this, and Barrett nodded approvingly. "Bill didn't plan to be a hero," he admitted. "Not his style to die with his boots on." Both men chuckled at this image and then Barrett went on, raising his sad, penetrating eyes to Mo's: "Listen, Mo, here's the thing.

You know and I know that you're coming here with some problems left over from White Plains—the thing with Wolf Dickie, your other disciplinary problems. You and I know you're hot shit but an uneven performer. And you and I also know what a mess Wild Bill left. Frankly, everyone else in the office knows it too. But Bill was well-liked—had that sort of, what do they call it, Teflon, and no one was going to complain, not with him out of here so soon. But what's going to happen now is, if I don't start giving you some new work, I've got to redistribute cases. People are going to complain about their caseloads, think you're not pulling your weight."

"You mean you don't think I've got much Teflon?" Mo said. He intended it as a joke.

Barrett continued, expressionless, the irony lost on him. "No, you don't seem to. So your best advice is to wrap these up soon and get in the line like everyone else. On some of Bill's I'd like to see results. Some of them may just have to put to bed. Dead letter office."

No case was actively pursued forever. When no one had made headway on a case in a reasonable amount of time, the file was placed in a sort of holding pattern—available for any new information that might come in but not actively pursued on a daily basis unless something significant warranted reactivation. After a while, the investigator's reporting period for a go-nowhere case got longer and longer, and the case file was put in progressively deeper and more obscure storage repositories until it was truly forgotten.

"Okay," Mo said. "I plan to do a lot of legwork this week and next. If nothing budges—"

Just then the phone on the desk wheedled, and Barrett leaned over to pick it up. "BCI, Barrett," he said into the mouthpiece, "hold on a minute." He punched the hold button with a thumb. "Okay," he went on to Mo, "sounds like you've got the right take on this. And listen, play by the book this time, Ford. Keep in close touch with me, am I being clear? The word is
teamwork,
right?" He hit the hold button again.

"Yeah," he said.

Mo let himself out of the office, to his surprise feeling rather good. He was somewhat affirmed by Barrett's apparent faith in him, despite the Teflon comment and his closing reminder that Mo's status was tentative and he was to run his cases strictly by standard procedures, not go off on his own or indulge his instincts. He poured a cup of coffee, brought it back to his office, and sat down at his desk.

Okay. The vehicular homicide would be the first case to be put to bed. He opened the file and reviewed it as he sipped the coffee. The hit-and- run had happened about four months before, in early August. The twenty-three-year-old victim, Richard Mason, had been out with friends earlier in the day. Around midnight, for some reason, he'd parked his car on Highway 138, at the top of the Lewisboro Reservoir, and gone for a walk. Someone had struck him hard enough to kill him and then had driven on, leaving the body in the eastbound lane at a sharp bend. Which was where, at around half past midnight, Betty Rosen and her husband ran over it again with their Ford Taurus stationwagon as they drove home from dinner and a play in the city. Betty was driving because Theodore's night vision was not good. They came around the bend and had no time to slow before hitting the body. After the impact, they had stopped long enough to look back at the remains, and then, in shock, they'd driven on to report the incident.

According to the accident report, it was a gory scene the Rosens had viewed in the glow from their taillights. Mo had read the report carefully but had not looked at the photos, a couple dozen eight-by-tens, which were in the file in a white envelope. The episode in White Plains had shown him that he didn't have much stomach for blood, and if at all possible he intended to work on this case without ever looking at the photos. There was no need—the crime scene team's report, the medical examiner's report, the accident reconstructionist's report were very detailed, and he trusted their judgment. Anyway, his imagination was quite good.