Skull Session

  Mo paused to get his thoughts in order. What he wanted to do was get the Gilmores talking, telling him about their son, without having to overtly steer them. Probably Wild Bill had been trained before the newer cognitive interviewing techniques had become part of basic investigative procedure—he'd sit down, ask 'em the who what when where and why, take his notes, draw his conclusions. The problem being that memory doesn't work that way. If Mo wanted to get details that Bill had failed to turn up, his best bet was to encourage in the Gilmores a deep state of recollection, stream-of-consciousness remembering.

  Mrs. Gilmore seemed to need to unload, and Mo let her talk, her husband interjecting comments occasionally. From what they said, Dub was a pretty average kid: sports, girls, buddies, some mischief, medium student at school. No indications of drug use, but he'd pilfered scotch from the liquor cabinet on a couple of occasions. He had a slightly punk haircut, Mrs. Gilmore said, but he didn't have that cynical attitude: He'd spent half the summer teaching his little brother to ride a two-wheeler. Once this spring, after Mrs. Gilmore had had a stressful day, he'd given her a neck and shoulder massage. How many kids his age would give their moms a massage, Detective Ford?

  After half an hour, the Gilmores wound down, having failed to reveal anything of particular use.

  Mo waited until he was sure the flow had stopped. "I'd like to ask you some questions about Dub's personal life." He read through the questions he'd prepared about Dub's friends, about kids he may have spent time with in extracurricular activities or sports, about what kind of mood he was in before he disappeared. Pen pals, friends who had moved away, people they'd met on vacations. They gave him a few new names, which Mo wrote down. Dub sounded like a pretty normal kid. His mood when he disappeared was not unusually depressed or distant.

  "I know you've been asked this before, but please tell me—do any of these names mean anything to you?" He read them the names of the other missing teenagers: Mike Walinski, Essie Howrigan, Steve Rubio.

  "The Howrigans we have met," Mrs. Gilmore said. "At dinner at some mutual friends'. I think Essie was in Dub's English class last year, but not this year."

  "Do you have any reason to believe they spent time together?"

  "No. None." Something in Mo's face must have caught her atten- tion. "Mr. Ford," she said, "we were a fairly close family. There were girls Dub was sweet on. We've told you their names. As a family, we always tried to keep communication open. Dub wasn't shy about telling us who he was interested in. But he never once mentioned Essie Howrigan. I'm sorry."

  Mo asked a few more perfunctory questions, but he could see that it was time to wrap up the interview. As memories of Dub awoke, so did the grief, and both parents began to look drained. He stood up, closed his notebook, and promised he'd stay in touch.

  Mr. Gilmore ignored Mo's hand when he offered it. "So," he said, "you got nothing at all from us. Not a goddamned thing, right?"

  "It's too soon to tell. You've given me a lot to follow up on."

  " 'Too soon to tell'? My son's been gone for two months, Mr. Ford. How long is long enough for you guys?" He went to stand at the window, his back to Mo, slapping his thigh with the folded newspaper.

  Mrs. Gilmore led Mo to the door, not saying anything until they got to the entrance hall. "Mr. Ford," she said, "I'd like to apologize for my husband's tone."

  "That's not necessary. Not at all."

  She looked into his eyes beseechingly and continued in a hushed voice, as if desperate for his understanding. "You see, when something like this happens, it . . . it violates your trust in the whole world. That it's really not . . . a very nice place. That you can't have faith in what will happen anymore. And you stop trusting anybody. Even the police. Even"—she looked back toward the living room—"each other."

  Mo went down the sidewalk to his car. So that was it, Mo decided, the look the Gilmores had in common, despite their different responses: a marrow-deep caution, a holding back. The foundation of basic trust knocked out from under them. For a moment, the morning's fatigue came rushing back upon him, and he fought it off by taking deep breaths of the cold air. He wasn't cut out to be anyone's marriage counselor.

  Mo steered with one hand and wolfed down a couple of vending-machine packages of peanut butter-and-cracker sandwiches, which he kept in the glove compartment for blood-sugar emergencies. By the time he got to the Howrigans' neighborhood, his stomach was beginning to process the food and he could feel his energy returning.

  The Howrigans lived on one of several looping streets of a subdivision that had been built in the early seventies, cheaper homes in shades of pale green and blue aluminum siding, middle class without much pretension. Marty Howrigan was a thick-set man of medium height, with a beerdrinker's hard paunch and an aggressively projecting mustache the same red as his hair. He gave Mo a firm handshake in a square, muscular hand and led him back into their living room, where his wife and daughter waited.

  "Girls, this is Detective Ford. Mr. Ford, my wife, Janis, and my daughter, Brittany." Howrigan tossed himself down into a wing chair.

  Mo shook hands, immediately experiencing discomfort at the proximity of Janis. She was heartbreakingly beautiful. She looked too young to have a sixteen-year-old daughter. Over her jeans she wore a man's blue work shirt, untucked but held to her slim waist with a thin red leather belt. She had rich dark hair that set off her pale skin and startlingly blue eyes. A true Black Irish beauty, Mo thought. Flawless eyebrows and cheekbones. And the thing that really nailed him: the sadness in her eyes, around her perfect mouth. The hint of uncertainty and melancholy that awoke his chivalrous feelings.

  After seeing Janis, it took a conscious effort to keep his eyes where they ought to be, looking to each of the three as they spoke. Mo cursed himself for his vulnerability.

  The Howrigans clearly weren't planning to let him take the lead. "We did some homework based on what you told us you wanted," Janis said. She handed him several sheets of paper on which names were listed, each followed by a paragraph of text. "These are the names of every one of Essie's friends and acquaintances. Everyone she baby-sat for, people she worked with in our church group, kids she worked with washing cars for the school teams." Janis leaned across the coffee table to point to a paragraph, and Mo caught the sweet scent of her hair. "We all made notes about what we knew about her relationship with them, and I compiled them. I thought it would save you time."

  "My wife has a computer database and this on-line network to help us find Essie," Marty Howrigan told him. "Not that we don't trust you guys to do a good job. We're just determined we'll find her. One way or the other."

  Mo scanned the list, then brought out the new list he'd compiled at the Gilmores' and compared it with Janis's meticulous notes. It was disappointing.

  "If you wouldn't mind, I'd like to briefly go over each of these with you. Brittany, I'd like your help on this. Often a brother or sister knows things a parent doesn't. Okay?"

  Brittany nodded. She was about eleven, a tall, skinny girl with braces.

  They went down the list, the Howrigans filling in any missing details as Mo asked questions. Essie was an active girl, belonging to various clubs and youth groups, and the list of people she'd associated with was quite long. After several entries, Janis had noted "T.C."

  "What does ' T . C stand for?" Mo asked Janis.

  "That's 'Teen Companion.' It's a program at our church, where teens go out and spend time with the elderly or people who have problems that a companion can help with. Some of them are housebound and just need company."

  "It looks like Essie was very active in the group."

  "Yes, this last year especially."

  "Ella Marbin, Dorothy McKenzie, Heather Mason, Wally Graham—do you know all these people? Are they all members of your church?"

  Marty Howrigan answered: "Some are. Some are referred to the T.C. group by one agency or another—Social Rehabilitation Service, Senior Wheels, that kind of thing."

  "Ella is a member
of our church," Janis put in. She leaned close again and put a slim finger on the entry. "She's seventy-six and broke her hip last fall. Essie went to her house once a week to play cards and help with cleaning. Dorothy McKenzie we don't know personally but is also elderly. She has vision problems. Essie read to her."

  Brittany spoke up. "Heather Mason isn't old—she's like retarded or something."

  "She's not retarded, Brit," Janis said. "I understand she is a teenager with behavioral problems. Essie was spending a lot of time with her— two or three afternoons or evenings a week. We don't know the family."

  "What about this last one?"

  "Wally. I've met him. He's cute," Britanny said.

  "Wally is a seven-year-old who has muscular dystrophy. He's in a wheelchair. A very nice little boy who can't do much and as a result doesn't have many friends. Essie just played with him." When Janis leaned back into the couch, her eyes were brimming despite her iron resolve.

  Marty Howrigan spoke again, forcefully: "Maybe you can see why we think Essie is a very special kid. We want her back."

  They went on, discussing each friend and contact. Only when they reached the end did it dawn on Mo that something was missing from the list.

  "Mrs. Howrigan, I hate to bring this up, but I have to ask. Doesn't Essie have a boyfriend? I mean, she's sixteen, she's a beautiful girl, surely—"

  Janis hesitated, looked uncomfortable. "No. No boyfriend."

  "Never? You've done a fine job of listing every last friend and acquaintance, but I don't even see any old boyfriends here. Guys she used to like."

  The parents looked at each other, and Brittany became very interested in the ribbon at her collar. The micro-momentaries—sudden activation of small muscle movements, like Marty's mustache twitching, the changeable weather of Janis's eyes and brows—told Mo he'd hit a topic of concern. Probably, therefore, of value.

  "The fact is, we don't know," Marty admitted. "Essie is very reserved about that aspect of her life. We respect that. We don't pry."

  Janis looked distressed. "Brittany, honey, can you do me a favor? Get me a drink of water? With ice, sweetie."

  Brittany stood up and stumped out of the room, aware that she was being gotten rid of.

  "Part of it was the church group, Mr. Ford," Janis said. She glanced at her husband, eyes brimming again. "They are so thoroughly . . . clean-cut. Such good, traditional values. Essie took it all to heart. At first I was glad. But I think the new pastor went too far—I mean, this emphasis on chastity and virginity and all that. They never mention sex without mentioning diseases or—"

  "Janis, Mr. Ford doesn't want to hear it."

  "Essie was a good girl," Janis said, crying openly now. "She really, deeply, wanted to be good and virtuous."

  "She was good and virtuous. She is," Marty Howrigan insisted.

  Mo coughed. "To your knowledge, was Essie sexually active?"

  The Howrigans were silent for a moment, looking at each other. Some gulf had opened between them. The look Marty Howrigan gave his wife seemed slightly fearful, as if he saw for the first time that whole areas of his daughter's life might be secret from him—and that his wife might not, in fact, always tell him everything.

  "Not to my knowledge, no," Marty Howrigan said cautiously.

  Janis wiped her lovely eyes with the sleeve of her shirt. "I don't think so. I mean, I don't know either. That's my point," she said, looking at her husband. "It's not whether she had boyfriends or not that bothers me, it's that she didn't feel she could ever, ever talk about it to us. Ever.

  Don't you see, Marty?"

  "This is an old discussion," Marty said. He threw himself back against the chair, started to speak again, then clapped his hands on his thighs and shut his mouth.

  "Then let me ask you this," Mo put in, not willing to let the revelations stall, "what sort of mood was Essie in when she disappeared?

  Was she different in any way? The day she left, the weeks preceding her disappearance?"

  "I don't know," Janis said dully. "Maybe."

  "Maybe how?"

  "She was, I'd say, preoccupied," Marty said.

  Janis nodded. "Just a little off. Not always paying attention. I just thought it was, you know, a developmental stage."

  Brittany returned with a glass of water for her mother and sat again on the couch. Janis Howrigan took the glass absently. She had withdrawn, not looking at anything, lost in her thoughts. That tragic inwardness—another mannerism that always got to Mo, pierced him to his heart.

  Mo asked the three of them some more questions, but it was clear the interview was effectively over. When he stood to go, Janis was staring at her glass of water, which she hadn't taken a drink from. She nodded vaguely but didn't speak to him or look at him when he said good-bye.

  Driving around the reservoir for the third time that day, he fumed at himself. His heart felt wrecked in his chest, simply because a beautiful woman had not shown any special interest in him when he left. What had he expected? A lingering, meaningful gaze from a woman mourning her lost daughter? He was as vulnerable as a lovesick boy.

  He'd liked the Howrigans, but he should have known that there was buried stuff there. Like every family. So the two parents had very different politics, especially when it came to issues of sexuality. Unless Essie turned up, they could wrangle over it for the rest of their lives—whose fault it was, whose philosophy was right, which of them had failed her as a parent. And how would Brittany deal with it when her turn came? She'd see the fork in the road soon enough, and have to choose.

  Mo raged at himself and then found himself venting his anger on the Howrigans. Brittany: another one of those idiotic, pretentious names that were so in fashion, along with Chelsea, Tiffany, Heather, Courtney, et cetera. Cutesy, turn-of-the-century, pseudo-Anglo, yuppie. It wasn't until he'd driven another five miles that he realized the explosion about Essie's sex life, or the lack thereof, had deflected his thoughts. Something important had slipped through. Something about the names—another fashionable name. He thought back. One of the Teen Companion people: the teenager, Heather Mason. He'd have to check the files as soon as he got back to the barracks. If he remembered right, Heather Mason was the name of Richard Mason's sister—Richard Mason, the hit-and-run victim, the young man who had ended up at the end of a ninety-foot blood fan. On Route 138, not two miles from the Howrigans'.

  10

  "I'M NOT GETTING IT," Paul told Lia. "I don't get clear when we do this shit, the way you do. Like right now I'm swarming. I'm full of maggots." His abdomen seized in wrenching tics, explosions of air choked in his throat. A vaguely threatening tune was playing in his head, so loud he could hardly hear. He couldn't place the title, another growing irritation. When Lia had first planned the dive, a month before, it hadn't seemed such a bad idea, but now the danger had begun to seem all too real.

  "Just see to your gear, I guess," Lia said. She wasn't unsympathetic: When she had the wild light in her eyes, that was philosophy, not advice. She wore a heavily insulated, hooded wetsuit, glistening black and neon blue with purple knee pads, that made her look like a female Master of the Universe. She checked her tanks, her regulators, her lights, her buoyancy compensator, hands flying. Obviously keyed up.

  Lia had borrowed the equipment from another friend, a fellow member of CD A, Cave Divers Anonymous. The name of the organization was indicative, Paul thought, suggesting compulsion and addiction. He wished the diving gear, with its dials and tubes, rubbery straps, molded shapes, didn't resemble medical apparatus quite so much.

  It was early Thursday afternoon. They had left the Subaru parked by the side of a dirt road, then packed the gear through the woods two hundred yards on a path that, presumably, only CD As knew about. The entrance to the cave was a low triangular cleft in a tumble of granite chunks at the base of a cliff Though Paul could hardly squeeze himself through, the passage opened inside to a room-size cave that Lia called The Foyer, where they stopped to dress and to perform the last equipment
check before the dive. At the far end of The Foyer, another small hole opened, black and wet-looking.

  "It's not just the element of risk." Lia cinched her tanks, made small adjustments. "There's curiosity too. And it's beautiful in there—it's strange and magical. You'll see."

  Paul looked again at the map Lia had provided him, a Day-Glo yellow sheet of tough thin plastic with the winding labyrinth of the cave marked in black. It reminded him of something anatomical. They were about to slip inside the body of some giant creature.

  "And the great thing is, it registers,19 Lia went on. "So often we're so cluttered with day-to-day preoccupations, we don't really see what's around us. It all gets filtered through the morass of daily crap, we miss a lot. The beauty of fear is that it cuts through, forces you to live in the moment. Watch how well you remember everything, later on."

  "I'm feeling more cluttered. Damn it, Lia, I've got Tourette's."

  "But you've said yourself when you're focused it goes away. I've noticed that after stress, you're calmer. Could it be that exposure to risk or tension desensitizes you to stressors? Who knows, Paul, maybe this is a way to reduce your symptoms."

  It was possible. But Paul's resistance was also connected to Lia. Her intensity, the hunger, was as frightening as anything here.

  When they were both suited up, forehead lamps in place, Lia led the way to the slot at the end, flippers slapping the rock. "I'm given to understand this is a rare structure for the East Coast, a remnant of volcanic action—chutes and tubes and pockets. This one is pretty small, only a mile or so of passages."