Skull Session

  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.

  It was almost eleven by the time he got back to his apartment, feeling baked, beat, fried. He had swung the door open before he noticed the note that was taped on it at eye-level. He flicked on the lights, wincing at the unflattering illumination of his bare apartment, and opened the folded paper.

  It was a short note from Alice, his neighbor downstairs, inviting him to drop by for some wine if he felt like it, don't worry if it's late. Alice had been making her interest clear since he'd moved in. Mo swore she had a radar that could spot a single man, could pick up that single man's lonelier and more vulnerable moods. Or maybe it was just that her apartment was directly below his, allowing her to hear his footsteps, and that Mo could generally be counted on to be in a lonely and vulnerable mood.

  She was in her late thirties, divorced, a sweet kid, and not Mo's type at all. Mo had run into her on the street a couple of times, once accompanying her to the deli to grab a sandwich. She'd talked at him fast and loud, office gossip from the travel agency where she worked. Overdone black hair piled and frizzed and sprayed into place, a plain face that she tried to dramatize with too-bright lipstick and eyeshadow, and a good figure kept trim from aerobics classes at Mt. Kisco Athletic Club, where Mo also worked out occasionally. In fact, it was the recollection of meeting Alice in the lobby of the club—smiling, scrubbed clean of the too-much makeup, wearing a red-and-white-striped leotard and white tights—that now bothered Mo. Damned good legs, trim stomach, broad hip bones. Aerobics-firmed arms and shoulders. Downstairs right now with a bottle of Chardonnay.

  Why not? Mo got a beer from the refrigerator and slumped in his chair. Why the hell not? Partly because nothing came without a price, and if the price was at some point in days or weeks having to tell her it wasn't going to work out, then it was too steep. She was just doing what he was doing, keeping the loneliness at bay however she could, and she didn't need any more disappointments. Anyway, the image of Alice in her tights had quickly given way to the memory of Lia McLean, the sun slanting onto her dark honey-colored hair, her clear, alert eyes, the sweet perfection of her legs in her jeans as she sat in the wing chair at Highwood—

  Mo swigged down the beer, took off his shoulder holster and draped it over the chair at the head of his bed. If he were smart, he would probably go see a shrink or join some self-esteem group or men's drumming circle or whatever crap you did nowadays, to figure out his thing with women. The hell with it. He hoped he'd be able to get some sleep. He cut the light and got into bed.

  39

  ON FRIDAY, MO MADE A point of stopping in Tommy Mack's cubicle first thing. It was wise to catch the Lewisboro barracks' lone Narco investigator early, before the day's stress and overwork and frustration had melted down his circuits. Tommy should have burnt out long ago, but some incredibly durable part of his constitution kept him coming back at it day after day, year after year, hke an Irish
pub brawler with an iron jaw. In the mornings, before the day got away from him, he was generally clear-headed and not unfriendly. Tommy was too harried to give Mo's past any concern; probably, if put to a choice, he'd be one of those to come down in Mo's favor for having put those neat clusters of holes in the mutts in White Plains—especially given that it was a drug-related thing, Tommy's specialty.

  "Yo, Tomas," Mo said.

  "Oy," Tommy returned, not looking up.

  "You were in here pretty late last night. I thought I smelled something cooking—you must have some pot about to boil over."

  "Ahh." Tommy looked disgusted. "That was the smell of burning insulation." He tapped the side of his head meaningfully. Tommy saw himself as a David, facing every day the Goliath of entrenched state and federal bureaucracies and the tangled morass of the laws he was expected to enforce. It wasn't a good idea to get him started.

  "Got a question for you. Have you got anything going with this place, Highwood, over on the Lewisboro Reservoir Road? I need to look into some things there, but I don't want to step on anybody's

  toes."

  "Huh?" A blank look.

  "You using uniform help on a marijuana case in that area?"

  "Uniform help like who?"

  "Pete Rizal."

  "Rizal?" Tommy made a face like he'd bitten into something rotten. "No," he said. "Not using Rizal on anything."

  "Well, let me ask you this: If there was anything going on in Lewisboro, maybe out of another jurisdiction or something, you'd know about it, right?"

  Tommy smiled evilly. "Who, me? Hey, I'm just the Narco officer in charge here, that's all. Why would anybody let me know what the fuck they were doing?" He laughed sourly. "Seriously, what kind of thing? If it's something big or something imported, Customs or the DEA might take the lead, I might not know first off. But they sure as hell wouldn't be asking for uniform support at the barracks level if that's what it was."

  "What I heard was, it concerned somebody bringing home-grown marijuana down from Vermont."

  Tommy shook his head no. "Then we'd get it first. Lewisboro, North Salem, they'd call us in right away. It'd be ours. We've got nothing like that going right now."

  Mo thanked him and went back to his own office. So Paul was right—Rizal had some other ax to grind. How did he tie in?

  He left a message at the office of Bennett Quinn, the agent in charge of the Ridgefield case of the human thigh, asking for a call back, then did the same with Dr. Mathewson, the medical examiner who had done the autopsy on Richard Mason. His telephone luck wasn't running good and Mo decided to give it a rest.

  Back at his computer, Mo did some more routine work, looking up Royce Hoffmann. As he'd suspected, there was nothing. The petty vandalism Royce had committed back when, "criminal mischief," wouldn't ever have made it past the police blotter to a permanent file. As for more serious juvenile crimes, it was hkely that Royce or his mother had asked for a sealing order that permanently expunged any record of criminal activity from police files. Very common for juvenile offenders.

  Mo sat with his notebook in front of him, thinking about what he'd learned. The sticky one was Rizal. It looked as if Pizal had motives of his own for his visits to Highwood. His main goal, if he had one, seemed to be to get Paul to leave the job. Why? The problem was that looking into a fellow State Police employee wasn't easy to do, especially when half the system had doubts about Mo's own conduct. Without bringing a charge of malfeasance or conduct unbecoming, he didn't have any right to suspect Pdzal of anything. He was willing to bend rules, but this was serious stuff, enough to ruin Rdzal's career or his own. He'd have to give the matter some thought.

  Next he ran a search for Salvatore Falcone, who according to Paul Skoglund had been a gardener at Highwood. Paul had said that his aunt suspected Falcone because they'd had some kind of altercation long ago. NYSPIN showed that a Salvatore Falcone, of Purdys, had been charged twice with assault and battery, with one conviction resulting in a jail sentence, in the mid-eighties. Mo jotted down Falcone's address and telephone number.

  What he needed was some local perspective on Falcone. Mo thumbed through his Rolodex until he came up with a name Wild Bill had suggested as a resource in North Salem, Sam Lombardino, who for the last twenty years had run a dry cleaning business by day and worked as one of North Salem township's police constables by night. Sam had lived in the area all his life and would know about Falcone if there was anything to know about.

  Risking the phone again, he called the dry cleaner's number, and the woman put him through to her boss.

  "Mr. Lombardino? This is Mo Ford, State Police BCI in Lewisboro. Have you got a minute?"

  "I got about that," Lombardino answered. He had a gruff, harried voice. "Everything's gone haywire down here, I got repairmen all over the place."

  "Okay, this won't take long. I'm looking into a case, I can't disclose the specifics just yet, but the name Salvatore Falcone came up. You know him?"

  "Yeah, Salli. Family's been in the area forever."

  "Ever have any trouble with him?"

  Mo heard the sound of the phone being covered with a palm and Lombardino's muffled voice, barking at his repairmen or whoever. Then: "Sorry. I got a mess down here. Salli's got a wife and four kids, drinks a little too much and gets mad too easily. I had to arrest him once, for beating the stuffing out of a couple of guys. Salli's a big guy, not someone you want to get physical with. But I got him into the car okay.

  I knew his father a little bit, twenty, thirty years ago. When he saw it was me, he calmed down."

  "He the type to hold a grudge?"

  "I'd have to say no, I'd think he gets it out of his system pretty fast. In fact, I wish he'd hold his grudges a little better. And his booze."

  "Do you know where he works?"

  "Well, I saw him at the butcher counter in Croton Falls for a while, but I think he moves around, job to job, quite a bit." Through the phone, Mo heard a loud clunk! followed by a gabble of voices. "Son of a—listen, I gotta go now. I don't know anything that'll help you anyway."

  After saying good-bye to Lombardino, Mo checked his watch, then put on his coat. It was nearly lunchtime, and he thought he'd visit the grocery store in Croton Falls, see if he could get a look at the Great Beast Falcone.

  Falcone had left his job at the grocery store, but the manager said he'd heard he went to work at Jason's Gym in Danbury. The manager hadn't fired him; he'd quit.

  "The gym job's perfect for Salli," the manager said. "He was there half the time anyway, training for these bodybuilder competitions." He made a gesture around his own bony chest, signifying bulging muscles.

  Driving toward Danbury, Mo realized that if Falcone had worked at Highwood in the early sixties, he'd now have to be the world's oldest competing bodybuilder. He wished he'd looked more closely at the records. Something didn't figure.

  At Jason's Gym Mo followed his nose to the workout rooms and spotted Falcone immediately. There were only a few people inside. But directly in front of Mo was a broad, muscled back shaped like a shield, glistening with sweat. Falcone was seated on the bench of a Universal machine, wearing small purple briefs, a sleeveless T-shirt and training shoes, no socks. As Mo watched, he raised the bar and lifted an incredible column of stacked iron weights. The muscles of his shoulders swelled and striated as he did eight repetitions, then dropped the bar. The floor shook with the pile-driver impact.

  Falcone groped for a towel and wiped his body down. An impressive specimen, Mo admitted. His thighs and arms were wadded with muscle, his sweat-soaked T-shirt clung to a stomach sectioned into sharply defined squares, his calves were swollen spheres gripped by branching blue veins. Black hair, heavy brows, a square face. He put the towel over his shoulder and approached Mo.

  "Help you?" he asked.

  "Are you Mr. Falcone?"

  "Yeah. What d'you need?"

  "I'm Morgan Ford. I'm an investigator with the New York State Police. I was hoping I could talk to yo
u." Mo flipped open his ID.

  Falcone glanced around the room. "What the hell? I just started working here. I don't need any trouble." He took a black sweatshirt from a hook and pulled it over his huge torso. It was a hooded sweatshirt, but the sleeves had been cut out to reveal Falcone's knotted arms. With his face shadowed by the hood, arms bare, Falcone looked like a medieval executioner.

  "There won't be any trouble if you answer some of my questions." Mo tipped his head toward the free-weight room, empty now. "We could go in there to talk. If your boss asks what it's about, tell him I'm thinking of becoming a club member."

  In the free-weight room, Falcone sat on a tall stool while Mo leaned against the wall, facing him. "I don't know nothing about nothing," Falcone said. "Whatever it is, you got the wrong guy."

  "Maybe so. You're not who I thought I was going to be talking to. Your father's name is Salvatore too, right?" Mo had figured his mistake the moment he saw Falcone's unlined face. He couldn't be any older than thirty-five, if that.

  "That's right."

  "Where's your father now? Maybe he's the one I should be talking to."

  Falcone gestured with both hands, as if throwing something into the air, Italian for it's a moot point. "He's dead. We think he's dead. He disappeared a long time ago."

  "Why do you think he's dead? Maybe he just—"

  Falcone thrust the idea back at Mo with a gesture of his huge right arm. "You never heard of family pride? You don't know my father, you don't know my family. So don't insult. My father wouldn't have left my mother and us kids."