Skull Session

  When he swung open the door, he spotted Pete Rizal standing at one of the sinks, working his hair with a comb. Trooper Rizal clearly liked to look at his own face.

  Rizal was one of the people at the Lewisboro barracks who had made a point of making things hard for Mo. A career policeman, he had grown up in Golden's Bridge, and Mo had decided he was one of the species of local boys who had become cops originally for the prestige it had given them in the eyes of their high school buddies. Later on, when playing cop began to mean less and less to anyone, the type tended to get mean and pushy, milking the position for whatever little powers it conferred. Mo could see it in Pdzal's narrow face.

  Not long after he'd started at Lewisboro, he had glimpsed Rizal at the A&P with a pretty Asian woman who he assumed was Pazal's wife, pushing the wheelchair of a teenaged boy all knotted up with muscular dystrophy or something. He'd heard some talk about the kid's problems, and the sight of the three of them gave him a quick pang of sympathy.

  Living with that couldn't be easy. Mo assumed the guy was human, although it was easy to forget.

  Mo took a stand at the sink next to him and pulled the toothpaste tube from his jacket pocket.

  "Whoa, Mr. Mo Ford," Rizal said, starting to put his hands up. "You got a fast draw. Take it easy with that thing—I'm on your side." This was a nasty little jab, in the context of the White Plains thing, but not a bad joke under the circumstances.

  Mo managed a smile. "Morning, Rizal," he said.

  "So how's our resident sharpshooter doin'?" Rizal kept working the dark hair back on his head, watching Mo in the mirror.

  "I'm doing about average, as usual. How about yourself?" He took the top off the toothpaste tube and squeezed some onto his brush.

  Rizal turned to look at him, feigning amazement. "Don't have a sink at home? Or are you just one very fastidious guy?"

  "Got an interview. Standard procedure," Mo lied. "Wouldn't want to offend. You know."

  "She good-looking?"

  Mo grinned around his toothbrush, then made a point of being engrossed in his brushing.

  Rizal slid his comb into his back pocket and leaned against the sink, arms crossed. "I've been meaning to ask you something. You know.

  About White Plains. I mean, we hear so many rumors."

  Here it comes, Mo thought. The asshole: Leave it to Rizal to wait until a guy has his mouth full and can't tell him to fuck off.

  He'd first run into Rizal at the State Police firing range, during his last firearms qualification. By that time, stories about the incident in White Plains had made the rounds of the various law enforcement agencies, and Fazal had apparently conceived some sort of competitive thing with Mo. Rizal had his own little reputation as a martial arts fanatic and an artist with a pistol. After the qualifications, they'd stood next to each other, ostensibly just getting in some practice but in fact checking each other out. Both were using standard Glock 17s. Rizal was scary fast, pak-pak-pak-pak-pak, eighteen shots in a matter of six seconds. Some of the other troopers and range personnel drifted over to watch, and Mo couldn't help but get into the competitive mood, picking up the tempo of his shots. He didn't consider himself an expert marksman so much as an instinctive shooter who often got lucky. Which wasn't bad but had its drawbacks in the long run. As he'd learned painfully at White Plains.

  They both put holes in five targets, fishing them back along the overhead cables as they reloaded, the other cops calling out totals to each other. Rizal was a good shot, but Mo had ended up ahead. And though he tried to act like he didn't care, Rizal had made a face like he'd sucked a lemon. He'd been pushing Mo ever since.

  "What I want to know," Rizal said, leaning back with exaggerated casualness, "is why you didn't go up when you knew Dickie was in trouble. Why you couldn't be bothered to keep Dickie alive."

  Mo brushed thoughtfully for a moment longer, then spat into the sink. He ran the tap and cupped a handful of water to his mouth, sluiced it through his teeth, spat again. He wiped his mouth. "I've got a question for you too, Rizal," he said. "What are you doing hanging around the men's room? I mean here at the barracks—I thought you preferred the rest stops on 1-84."

  "Fuck you," Rizal said.

  Mo yanked a paper towel from the dispenser and turned to the door, wiping his hands. "Sure. But be gentle," he said. He balled up the towel and tossed it into the trash, then shoved open the door and went out.

  Driving to the meeting at the Masons' house, Mo tried to relax his stomach, which had knotted up and was giving him heartburn. It wasn't the tension of dealing with a lightweight prick like Rizal, it was the recollection of that afternoon in White Plains.

  He wondered how long it would take before he was off the hook. Officially, the matter was closed, and he'd been cleared of wrongdoing, but among the other BCI staff and troopers—and in his own conscience—it was a different story.

  He'd been one of a four-man team sent to an apartment building in an older neighborhood to collect a witness, Harold Wallace, in a case against a small-time cocaine distributor. Actually, their game plan had been to corner Wallace, a balding, soft-bellied counter clerk at a discount electronics store, and persuade him to testify by threatening to pick him up on his own trivial involvement with the operation. It wasn't supposed to be a risky job that Saturday. Mo and Wolf Dickie and two agents from the DEA went over as a group because it was an interjurisdictional case, and to make sure Wallace didn't try to dodge them—he'd expressed reluctance to testify against his boss at the electronics store, the little-league coke kingpin. What they didn't know was that the enterprising boss had just finalized some ambitious partnerships with bigger-league players, that Wallace was in it deeper than they'd thought, and that he had visitors that day.

  Dickie and one of the DEA guys went upstairs, while Mo and the other agent covered the front and rear entrances to the building. It was a sunny but chilly day, and Mo waited in the brick gangway near the back entrance—four stories of wooden porches and open stairs—trying to keep his hands warm.

  The first thing Mo heard was the slap of one of the wooden screen doors on the third floor. After that came an odd sound, not loud, that he first took to be a pneumatic wrench from some nearby gas station. He didn't realize what it was until he heard the second short burst, louder, and got the sudden, salty whiff of cordite. He scuttled to the bottom of the stairs and would have gone up if the DEA agent who'd gone with Dickie hadn't come down in front of him and partially blocked the stairs. The guy had apparently toppled over the third floor railing after being hit with the second burst from the MAC-10. With brutal force, he hit the wooden banister not ten feet from Mo, spun and bounced. He ended up in a loose sitting position, propped absurdly on one elbow as if he'd been hanging out on the back steps and had downed too many beers. But the top half of his head was missing, tilted toward Mo so that he could see the interior of his brain case, empty, an oddly smooth, clean pink bowl that contrasted with the ragged edges of his skull and scalp.

  He'd left his brain on the second-floor landing.

  There was another quick burst of fire from the third floor, but Mo didn't move or flinch. He was too stunned at the sight of the DEA man. It wasn't fear. It was just an immediate and complete paralysis. That's what's inside our heads. He stood for several seconds, thinking vaguely about Dickie, still upstairs. Charging up the stairs exposed to fire from above didn't seem like a good idea, so he started down the gangway to alert the man at the front. He hadn't gone halfway, maybe forty feet, when he heard footsteps and turned to see two men leaping down into the gangway behind him. One carried the MAC and the other what appeared to be an Uzi, although Mo didn't consciously notice these because his arm was already coming up and then he was putting what turned out to be an incredibly tight cluster of three holes in the first man's chest, just below his left nipple. The second man put on the brakes and was bringing up his gun when Mo did the same thing again, a little more to the center, through the sternum. Pop-pop-pop, all reflex.
br />   At the inquiry conducted by Inspection, and later at the grand jury hearing, the DEA agent who'd been in front said he'd come around the corner of the building to see Mo standing in the gangway, popping the two guys a few more times. It was these extra shots, plus the tight constellations he'd gotten lucky with, that caused doubts to be raised about exactly what had happened. Why had Mo abandoned his post? Why hadn't he gone upstairs as backup to Wolf Dickie, when he could clearly surmise Dickie was in big trouble? Why, if he had such a revulsion for gore that the sight of the DEA man paralyzed him, had he repeatedly shot the gunmen when they were clearly already dead? Was it really possible that a guy could hit a moving target with three bullets spaced no more than two inches apart—not once but twice in rapid succession, under great duress?

  The press had a great time with it, all kinds of scandals were suggested, even a rumor that Mo was in some way involved with the cocaine ring and was finishing off witnesses who might expose him. It wasn't long before it became public knowledge that Mo already had two reprimands in his file and was known to be a difficult guy to work with. Even his admirers admitted that he'd operated too independently on a couple of cases, was prone to running with his gut instead of slogging through conventional investigative procedures, and tended to get impatient with the conferences and task force meetings that were standard.

  But ultimately it was the thing with Wolf Dickie. And there his worst sin, in the eyes of his superiors, was the public scrutiny he'd called down on the department.

  Mo's detractors in White Plains had been critical of him for not supporting Dickie, who was popular and had an excellent record, or for one or another violation of procedure, or for weakness or cowardice. But counterbalancing this was a secret respect for the shooting he'd done. Paradoxically, the extra shots, which gave him trouble at the official level, earned him back some respect among the rank and file. At some primal level, his supporters wanted to believe that Mo could shoot the balls off a housefly and would pay back in spades any fuckhead who messed with a brother officer.

  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

  "HEATHER 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."