Skull Session

  It had wanted to kill Essie. And Essie, after it had hurt her for the third time, so terribly, after he'd beenfiung hard against a tree and fell down and was trying to get up, Essie had said something. "Why are you doing this to me?" she'd asked. (
  Richard tried to block out the thought that came next and couldn't—the last thing Essie had said, when she must have known that she would be dead soon, some kind of insight bom of her own surrender: "Why are you so sad?" With the memory he began screaming, mourning her, Essie who was the one truly good person he'd ever met.

  Through the trees to the left he saw the fiat blank gray of the reservoir, and across the water a faint rim of light that must be the roof of the car, one more bend and he'd be there, and with the relief came hfitredfor himself for the little worm of gladness that he was going to live, that whoever it was had gone after Essie and not him and that's what had allowed him to get away.

  And just then he heard the sound start behind him, the rhythmic sawing like some dry insect in a hidden place, butfar toofast. The sound crescendoed rapidly, as fast as a car approaching, and then he knew he would die and he was almost glad. But he made one last attempt to run, thinking, Somebody has to know.

  28

  MO'S DEPRESSED MOOD BEGAN after his talk with Heather Mason and persisted through Thanksgiving Day and the weekend. After meeting with Heather, he went back to the office and tried to sort out what he'd learned, disturbed by the shifting faces of the schizophrenic girl. He had little doubt that she knew something about the death of her brother and maybe about the disappearance of Essie Howrigan. The difficulty lay in deciding what was truth and what was delusion, or fantasy, or manipulation.

  It was pretty clear that Pdchard Mason and Essie Howrigan had fallen in love during her visits to the Masons' house. No doubt Essie and Richard were screwing, making love, when they slipped off and left Heather in the car. For Essie it was an act so taboo that she couldn't risk letting her parents know anything at all about her connection to Richard. The excuse that she was going to spend time with Heather, a mission of charity, was the perfect cover. Thus having Heather's continuing cooperation became the key to the success of their lovers' conspiracy.

  Whatever, he was sure Heather had been telling the truth at least some of the time. He could readily believe that Richard and Essie had parked the car, walked to their trysting place, leaving Heather to wait as usual—the price she had to pay for their attentions to her. Later, when Heather had gotten tired of waiting and left the car, she'd seen something, maybe the accident, if it was an accident, and had fled home on foot.

  The question then was: What had Heather seen?

  On Wednesday night, after talking to Heather, Mo headed back to his apartment in Mt. Kisco, stopping on the way at the A & P, where he had to brave the crowds of people who were buying last-minute supplies for their Thanksgiving feasts. The only definitive plan Mo had made for the holiday was to decline a couple of invitations for dinner.

  At the A&P, he picked up some spaghetti sauce, some frozen chicken, a few cans of this and that. A Spartan diet, which he consumed without much interest in his Spartan apartment. In Mo's experience, people in his condition—emotional refugees from the divorce wars—did one of two things. About half made a big ritual of starting over, setting up house on their own, surrounding themselves with the trappings of stability by decorating their apartments, framing photos from their childhoods, learning to cook fancy cuisine. These were the ones who joined art classes, exercise clubs, hiking groups. Who made new friends to replace the old ones who inevitably got lost during the divorce. Mo envied them, their resilience and optimism.

  The other half did as Mo did: living expediently, entering a waiting mode, taking a penitential pleasure in sparse apartments and weekends spent mostly alone, the cleansing simplicity of single life. Anyway, even though the divorce from Dara had been a mutual decision, some period of mourning seemed in order. Maybe you had to be Jewish or Catholic to feel this way. Mo had both bases covered.

  His apartment consisted of three rooms on the second floor of an older brick building that had been renovated a few years before. White walls, a couch but no coffee table, his computer and printer on a stand, a few hard chairs, a folding table in the kitchen. In the bathroom, a cake hanging inside the toilet tank made the water run neon blue, like a motel toilet. Though he'd vowed every morning he was going to take the blue cake out, he never got around to it. Like the minimally furnished rooms, it had become another paradoxical affirmation: This is only temporary. The implication being that better things were in store.

  He ate a lousy dinner Wednesday night, thinking about Heather and getting nowhere, and then went to bed with his thoughts drifting back to the beautiful Janis Howrigan. Then for the rest of the night he kept up an internal discussion of love and marriage, which naturally brought him back to Dara and the divorce. Mrs. Mason's comment about love came back to him. What does "love" mean? She was right: Love is just another term, another abstraction. Another chimera.

  At its best, Mo decided, love was something mysterious, something you couldn't name, something that worked best when you left it alone; trusted it. It lived in the air between two people, and it had a life of its own.

  He'd spent three years with Dara. They'd both joked about the three-year cycle of their relationships, but in the end it had proven all they were good for. She was twenty-six when they'd met, four years younger than Mo, a serious dancer with an incredible grace of movement derived from hours at the bar and mirror. They'd met at a party, where from across the room he'd been caught by the ripple of energy, the bow wave she seemed to generate around her. Then he'd attended some performances her company put on in the city, and seeing her perfect legs and hips and flat stomach and firm, small breasts he'd begun to desire her almost unbearably. When they began to see more of each other, he'd learned that she had a complete intolerance of bullshit, not unlike his own. They'd laughed about that a lot.

  They'd both overcome a certain skepticism about marriage to actually tie the knot. Dara's reasoning was simple: "I'll try anything once," she'd said. For his part, Mo had joked for years that marriage was the best way to ruin a good relationship. But he was willing to see what happened. Like the rest of love, it was the mystery of marriage that attracted him.

  As it turned out, the first year and a half was quite wonderful. Dara had proven surprisingly adaptable, showing an interest in his work despite the sometimes gruesome stories he'd bring home, putting up with the odd hours he often had to keep. It was the memories from this period that came back to him now to give him grief.

  Once he'd come home at around one A.M. from a tense, fruidess stakeout to find her just out of the shower, wearing her yellow terrycloth robe and combing the knots out of her red hair.

  "I'm glad you're back," she told him.

  "Why's that?" he asked, feeling funky and looking for some flattery. He couldn't help but smile at the cascade of wet, coiling hair that hid her face. He popped a beer and slumped in a chair across the table from her.

  She didn't answer him directly. "I like being married," she said softly.

  "Why?"

  "Oh, I don't know. It brings out a different side of me. I feel safe, and when I feel safe I can be . . . softer. It's very sweet."

  The way she said it touched him, and he went to stand near her. "Let me see your face," he said, wanting to kiss her. He started to pull her hair aside, but she caught his hands. He could just see her mouth, smiling. "Why not?" he asked.

  "Because I'm shy," she said. "I'm not used to telling anyone stuff like this." He'd never thought of her as anything like shy.

  That was the kind of memory that gave him pain, so he usually tried instead to remember only the last year or so, the bickering and the infidelities and the many little ultimatums. At some
point he'd realized that rather than seeing more and more of that side of her, he was seeing less and less.

  Though they had started out with similar views on marriage, they ended up with very different perspectives. Dara felt her original view had been vindicated: Marriage wasn't for her. To his surprise, Mo found himself believing in marriage for the first time in his life—and doubting he'd ever find the thing he now knew he wanted.

  There was an endless supply of memories, good or bad, each causing one or another form of grief. Selecting the uglier memories was a way of protecting himself, he realized. Not unlike Heather Mason, holding on to mad to stay away from sad.

  The thought yanked him back to the present and the problems Heather posed. All his thinking was contingent on believing one very disturbed girl's fragmented, taunting narrative. Yet Mo's instinct told him some, at least, was true. Intuition, instinct, reflex—he had learned the hard way to distrust these parts of himself. Yet his hunches were persuasive. He carried on an internal argument until it exhausted him and he slept.

  On Thanksgiving Day, his cynicism about holidays wavered long enough to permit him to call his parents in their retirement community in Kissimmee, Florida. His father's angina had been acting up, but the new medication was helping. His mother had taken up tai chi classes with a bunch of other elderly Jewish ladies and was enjoying it enormously. And so on. Mo promised he'd come visit them on his next vacation, in January, and got off, wishing he hadn't called.

  On Monday he returned to the office to find an unusual letter in the mail. The monogrammed, lavender-tinted, excessively feminine stationery confused him until he opened the envelope and saw Heather Mason's name across the bottom. Written in ballpoint pen, the letter was short:

  Dear Detective Ford,

  Because I am only fourteen and schizophrenic, people don't ever believe what I say. They "interpret" what I say, they analyze it. They humor me but their eyes say, "This is her craziness talking." Dr. Kurtz makes a note on his pad about my paranoia, or my blunted affect, or the configuration of my delusional matrix, or my Risperdal dosage. A lot of the time even I don't know what to call the things I think, the things I remember, the things I write in my story. But you, I think you almost believe me. So I have another clue for you: It's going to happen again soon. Probably before Christmas. But maybe you figured that out already.

  P. S. I'm not sure if you believe me, but the other thing I wanted to tell you is that I said it was Superman, but that's not completely right because Superman does good things and saves people, and this one does just the opposite. But probably you know all this. If you don't, you will soon.

  Terrific. What did the girl know? Had she overheard Mo's conversation with her mother? Going to happen again soon. Had she figured out something that related to clusters in the timing of the disappearances? Mathematically gifted, her mother had said. Reads constantly about psychopathologies.

  Mo called Mrs. Mason again to ask if he could schedule another visit with Heather.

  "I'm afraid not," she told him. "Heather was very upset after your last talk with her."

  "Mrs. Mason, your daughter just sent me a letter that suggests she knows something. I'm more convinced than ever that she can help us locate Essie Howrigan."

  "Heather can be very manipulative. It is an established part of her psychological profile, and I wouldn't advise taking what she says at face value. No, Mr. Ford. My husband and I spoke with Dr. Kurtz about this. He's adamant that you're to have no more contact with my daughter."

  "Even if she can help me find out who killed Richard?"

  He heard her puff air out, struggling to keep control. "At this point, Mr. Ford, we have only one child left. And that one child is teetering on the edge. We're absolutely determined to protect her. Absolutely."

  Later on Monday he went to see Barrett to explore ways he might encourage or force them to let him talk to Heather. He assembled his notes from the interview, wrote down as much as he could of their conversation, verbatim, so that Barrett would understand the odd credibility of this otherwise unreliable witness.

  "So?" Barrett said. Barrett looked harried, his desk a litter of papers, his tie loosened and sleeves rolled up as if he were about to begin some heavy manual task. He chewed on a saliva-stained cigar which he was forbidden to light in his office because of the new smoking regulations.

  Mo told him his theory about Essie Howrigan and Richard Mason.

  "You got all that out of an interview with a fourteen-year-old schizophrenic?" Barrett looked incredulous.

  "If you'd heard her talk, you'd believe it too."

  "What you read from your notes sounds like gibberish."

  "It's disorganized, I know." He felt the relief of a near miss, glad he hadn't mentioned Heather's Superman comments. "But it ties in with other things we know—the date the Howrigan girl disappeared. All I want is another chance to talk to her. The parents are reluctant to let me see her again. I was thinking of, you know, what other recourse we might have—"

  "What, get a court order to produce her as a witness? Threaten an obstruction charge? You know, Mo—" Barrett started to get florid, then caught himself, reining in his anger. "Look. One: There's no way this office is going to sanction any of that shit on the basis of what you've told me. No way. Understand? Not a chance." Barrett began counting offhis points on his thick fingers. "Two: There's no way a judge is going to hand you an order, for the same reasons. Three: If you did try to compel her to talk against her own and her parents' wishes, these people have big bucks and prominent friends, and they'd have a lawsuit on us so fast it'd—" Barrett had gotten wound up again and almost choked on the idea, then brought himself back down and paused to glare at Mo intently for a second. Which wouldn't exactly increase your popularity around here, the glare seemed to say. He put the cigar on his desk with a look of distaste. "Look," he said again. "Roll with the punches, look for something else to back up her story. Maybe you can meet first with just the parents, sweet-talk them into another interview. Okay? Now, anything else this morning? I've got a shidoad here. I'm going to need a fucking forklift." He gestured at his desk.

  Then on Tuesday morning the car theft investigation came to a dead end as a guy Mo was scheduled to talk to, the one guy who knew anything, died during emergency heart surgery. It was an inauspicious start for the day.

  Late Tuesday afternoon, he got some news that ordinarily would have made him feel great: One of the missing kids, Mike Walinski, surfaced again, alive and well. Mo took a call from Mike's mother, who told him Mike had called. Turned out he'd run off with a friend he'd met at summer camp the year before. The two boys had hitchhiked to San Francisco together. Mo gathered that one reason Mike had been so hard to find was that he'd discovered his true sexual orientation and was afraid to try to explain it to his parents.

  Mo was glad the kid wasn't dead or maimed or whatever. And Mike's reappearance would just about nail the coffin lid on the go-nowhere multi-agency task force whose meetings Mo hated to attend—more support for Wild Bill's opinion that the whole missing kid thing was just a mild wave of adolescent rebellion in Westchester County. But in his current mood, he couldn't help feel the downside of Mike's reappear ance: another chunk falling away from his tinkertoy construction. No doubt Essie Howrigan would show up at some point too, and make Mo's theories look hke the crap they were. He'd been taken in by the wide, earnest eyes of Heather Mason, the eerie, oracular certainty of her pronouncements. The hell with it. He'd be better off selling insurance or something.

  But Wednesday was different, the luck started to turn. Mo came in, went over his notes for the interview he'd scheduled, thinking about what approach he'd use. This was an interview Wild Bill should have done but didn't, a sixteen-year-old kid who had been a good buddy of Steve Rubio.

  By ten-thirty he felt the need of some coffee, and took the opportunity to do a little background check on the kid he was about to interview. Code 913 hard-copy case files were kept in the main uniform offi
ce and held materials on recent juvenile run-ins with the police, including warnings and domestic troubles, and correspondence with the school liaison officer at Troop K headquarters in Poughkeepsie. He was elbow deep in a file drawer, just around the corner from the door to the uniform commander's office, when he heard Rizal's voice.

  "It's like I told you," Rizal was saying. "I see the junker's been moved from the bottom of the driveway, so I drive up to see if everything's okay. I'm out there alone in the woods, the house is a wreck, the guy's yelling obscenities at me, he comes toward me with a crowbar in his hand—"

  "Says he's Mrs. Hoffmann's nephew," Station Commander Miller's voice cut in. "That you had no reason to assume wrongdoing, that you were unnecessarily rough." Miller was thin, graying, a gentle man who probably should have been an Army chaplain, some man of the cloth.

  "He claims he's got a medical problem, Tourette's syndrome, that makes him say things. I looked it up."

  "I was rough? He said that? I requested he face the wall, I verified he was who he said he was. He seemed nervous, hke he was expecting trouble from me. I never heard of a medical problem that makes you tell a cop to fuck off. You believe that?"

  "Was it really necessary to draw your gun?"

  "When he didn't comply with my request, in this officer's opinion, definitely yes. The Rodney King scenario this was not, Chief. I said 'please' and 'thank you.' I identified myself as a law officer, I looked over his ID and returned it. That's it."

  Still searching the file cabinet, Mo heard Miller sigh. "Write up what you just told me, will you, Pete? I think he just wanted to blow off steam, and I don't think it's going to turn into anything. But I'd like to have the paper so we're in the clear."

  "You got it," Pazal said.

  "So Highwood was in pretty bad shape?"

  Rizal gave a whistle. "Are you kidding? Every window is broken.