Skull Session (35 page)

Just a flight of morbid ideation, he told himself. But the thoughts kept coming.
If it was designed as a vault, why are there air vents? Why are the
ceiling lights recessed and behind steel grates? Not a
darkroom
—
not without
plumbing or electrical sockets. Not with the light switches in Vivien's bedroom.

He could imagine Lia's skepticism: "Isn't that a bit
too
Victorian Gothic?" And ordinarily he'd have agreed. But after only a few days at Highwood, anything seemed possible.

Which brought up the question of Lia again: to talk to Lia about these things, or not? Why did the prospect of talking to her about this stuff make him feel so uneasy?

Because he didn't trust his own thought processes anymore. He couldn't deny it any longer. He had reduced his haloperidol dosage, and he had been changing. Things seemed clearer, patterns more apparent. Surprisingly, his tics had not gotten any worse. But the disturbing dream or memory images were getting more detailed, and the trancelike calm came upon him more often. And of course the flights of morbid ideation.

The problem was he couldn't tell a reasonable idea from a morbid fantasy. Hysterical hyperdynamism, the KKK, the secret sibling: A little factual support and a lot of vague, morbid intuition, and the images were as real as the night road rushing toward him in the headlights.

No, he couldn't talk to Lia about any of it just yet. She'd be skeptical, she'd be concerned for his mental well-being—a concern that wasn't entirely unjustified.

He didn't like the idea of a wedge opening up between them, especially now. Why was he so sensitive to the nuances of their relationship right now? Face it: He was holding back from telling her things because he didn't want to look stupid, nuts, overly cred- ulous—especially not since Detective Mo Ford had come into the picture, with his decisiveness and professionalism. The aura of competence and security around him. Lia's obvious attraction to him.

Pulling into the farm driveway, he reaffirmed his decision to wait on talking to her. He'd write to Dr. Stropes first, learn more about hyperdynamism; for the KKK and the secret sibling, he'd try to garner more clues from Vivien's papers, maybe talk to Vivien. Lia was high enough on the whole scenario. No sense in adding more fuel to the fire. Most important, he'd wait until he had a handle on his changing brain. In the long run, that was what mattered most.

43

M
O ROLLED OUT OF BED and winced at the glare of the sun off the waxed floors in the living room, reminding him that he didn't own a rug of any kind. Maybe he ought to spend a few bucks to make the place presentable. He made some coffee and drank it slowly, scalding hot, as he looked out the window at the street. After the dismal weather of Saturday, the bright sky seemed encouraging, beckoning, and the heat of the coffee radiated pleasantly from his belly.

Sunday morning—maybe he'd take a walk in the country. True, during their meeting on Friday, Barrett had told him that he'd gotten a call from Vivien Hoffmann, who had mentioned Mo's request for a consent search. "She emphatically reiterated that she will gladly comply with a court-ordered search, but that until such time as such a warrant is issued she wants nobody nosing around," Barrett said, glowering at him. "I told her, 'Of course, Mrs. Hoffmann, absolutely, Mrs. Hoffmann.' " Barrett looked like he'd had a bad night. "End of discussion. I'm not going to remind you that I don't want your problems working with your superior officers to surface here."

But it would be a shame to waste a nice day like this. Mo put on jeans and hiking boots, pocketed a tape measure and a magnifying loupe, strapped on his shoulder holster, and drove up to Golden's Bridge. He cruised slowly along Route 138, over the top of the Lewisboro Reservoir, until he came to the pullover where Richard Mason had parked the night he was killed. Mo locked his car and stood shivering in the chill breeze, looking through a thin screen of bare trees at the blue-gray water. On the far shore, the land rose, a dark hump of forest. The lodge at Highwood would be just about straight across, at the top of the swell of land. Four months after the fact, he had no expectation of finding anything specific here. He was just getting a feeling for the place. An intuitive understanding.

Mo walked east on 138, the route Richard Mason had taken, probably with Essie, the night he died. Forest framed the road, the reservoir showing through the trees on the right, a rock-strewn slope rising on the left. The occasional houses he passed were well up in the woods. All had security system warning signs out front, with company logos on them—a way of letting serious burglars know exactly what system they were dealing with, Mo thought cynically, what techniques they'd need to get past it.

About a half a mile from the car, the woods closed in. At the middle of the curve, no signs of habitation were visible, and the trees met overhead. Mo matched the scene with his memory of the accident-scene photos, placed the first point of impact, then the second. Then he kept walking east.

At the eastern end of the reservoir, he turned onto Marsh Road, which would connect with the old reservoir road. The trees here were big-boled willows, some still holding their leaves, dried and bleached pale. The area felt remote; only one car passed in the time it took him to walk three-quarters of a mile to the driveway of Highwood.

Standing at the stone pillars, Mo checked his watch. It had taken him thirty minutes to walk from his car to the bottom of the drive, but that included some backtracking and standing around. Walking without pausing, you could do it in fifteen minutes.

A new gate closed off the bottom of the driveway, painted in gray primer, and Mo leaned against it as he double-checked his conscience. Paul and Lia were in Vermont. The house was up there, unattended, and Mo really wanted another look through the place, without the distraction of Paul and, especially, Lia there. But he had no legal right to enter the property, he'd made a deal with Paul about respecting his aunt's privacy, Barrett had warned him, et cetera.

Inspecting his conscience took all of ten seconds. If it didn't hurt anyone, if it contributed to the Good Fight, do it. He turned and jogged quickly up and around the first bend in the drive.

Mo was blowing hard by the time he reached the crest and looked down at the circular drive and the lodge. In the diluted sunshine, the house looked forlorn. All around the lodge, bare tree branches tossed in the breeze, like an agitated but eerily silent crowd with arms raised. Uphill, the headless statues stood or lay, looking as if they'd been caught at some odd game and had frozen just as he came over the hill.

He started by walking around the outside of the house, skirting appliances and furnishings that, judging from the way they'd broken or embedded themselves in the soil, had been tossed from the windows. On the south side, Mo paced off the distance from a shattered bureau to the wall of the house and came up with thirty-five feet. Quite a throw. Could even a bull like Falcone accomplish it? Maybe—if he'd taken a good hit of methedrine beforehand. Maybe there was something to think about there.

Mo used his Swiss Army knife to slide the latch on the new kitchen door. Inside, he scanned the wreckage as he passed slowly through it. Looking for what? Signs of a struggle, for Christ's sake? The place was a disaster area.
But maybe hair. Blood.
Or anything that would let him open this up for the full-scale investigation it required.

Here and there, as he'd noticed during his first visit, suggestive dark stains marked a few of the walls. After quick inventory, he took out his jackknife and scraped off some of the discolored surface into a little envelope he fashioned from a teller's receipt he found in his wallet. It might be soup, for all he knew. Or blood from some animal, like the unlucky raccoon he had noticed in one of the bedrooms. He'd bring it to Helmut Pierce, one of the forensic chemists at the Vallhalla lab, for analysis, ask him to keep his request unofficial.

Cycles.
Was there a way of determining whether this was the result of just one psychopathic incident, one incident and a number of lesser visits by local teenagers, or several main incidents? In the downstairs bedroom, Mo knelt to look closely at the heaped mash of debris. Conceivably, there'd be stratification—the rubble would be layered and differentiated by type or condition in a way that would indicate the sequence of events. One by one, he began peeling back items from the heap. Blue terry-cloth robe: mouse droppings in the folds. A splayed
Psychology Today
magazine, January 1994 issue: faint variation of ink hue at open pages, suggestive of fading from exposure to light. Rags of white cotton cloth, as from shirts, mixed with splinters of wood: mildew stains, smell of mouse piss. A flattened wdre-and-fabric lamp shade, age-yellowed, dusty, mildewed. Shards of a heavy ceramic object, elaborately decorated on one surface, as of an Oriental vase. More magazines. A tangle of wicker, as of a chair seat.

He worked through the knee-deep debris all the way to the floor without finding anything definitive. The best observation he could make dealt with strata of mouse droppings, scattered like rice at a wedding: There was the top layer, then another heavier concentration about midway down in the heap, and another near the floor, suggesting that those levels had been exposed at one time and later covered by a successive layer of debris. Paper gave good clues too: Pages left exposed turned yellow and puckered, their ink faded.

Totally involved, he conducted another dig nearer the southeast corner, with similar results. The most suggestive object was a New York City white pages, which lay open below the corner window on the east wall. Phone book paper was infamously poor in quality, moisture-absorbent, prone to yellowing. From the condition of the paper and the places the book fell open, he couldn't help but feel it had lain open at three places, maybe four, during the last few months. A vague and inconclusive suggestion of three or four periods of disturbance.

He stood up, knees aching and hamstrings stiff. For the moment, short of a comprehensive workover with high-tech forensic support, he couldn't think of anything else to do. He'd neglected to eat breakfast, and it was after noon. The comfortable glow of coffee in his stomach had worn off, leaving an empty, acidic hollow. Time to head down the hill.

Mo was picking his way across the big room when a dull
whump!
echoed through the house. Immediately, adrenaline flooded his body, his hands tingled, glass dust in his blood. After several seconds, another thump and a faint crash. The sound seemed to come through the floor: Someone must be breaking into the downhill basement door or windows.

He moved quickly across the room to squat behind the remains of a couch. The position gave him a view of the whole north wall and the doors from the library and the kitchen. If someone came up from the basement or in through the kitchen door, they'd have to come through one of those doors.
Don't you want to know what happens to the detective?
Heather Mason had asked. He was surprised to see the pistol that had materialized in his two hands, leveled at the kitchen door.

He waited, breathing only minutely despite his pounding heart. For a time he heard only a few very faint sounds, someone's progress through the basement. Then silence. Then a loud crash. Someone had thrown something breakable against the wall in the kitchen. Too chilly only a moment ago, Mo felt a drop of sweat roll down his temple. Fear sweat.

It wasn't the intruder he was afraid of. It was Mo Ford and the gun he held in his hands. It was the lesson of White Plains. Inside him, almost with a life of its own, was a lethal, mindless thing which would strike like a snake, reflexively, unless he could control it.

Take it slow. Hold off.
Mo made his arms bend, brought up the barrel of the gun. He made himself breathe slowly and steadily.
Keep the finger
on the trigger guard. Take a good look. You'll have plenty of time.
The important thing was to stay conscious, deliberate.

Then there was another crash from the kitchen, and the light shifted in the dining room as someone filled the doorway and then there was a shape moving into the main room. Mo's arms straightened and his finger slipped into the curve of the trigger and the sight on the barrel tracked the left ear of the person as he took two steps and stopped. And then with a conscious effort Mo bunched his biceps and pulled the gun up again.

"Stop right there!" he shouted.

The boy's jaw dropped. He started to bolt, then froze.

"What the fuck you think you're doing?" Mo said. He stood up from behind the couch.

The kid's face was a mask of fear. He was about sixteen, dark longish hair, wearing an expensive leather jacket. He couldn't say a word.

Another shape emerged from the dining room door, a girl. "What?" she said, then "Oh!" when she saw Mo. She put her hands up, just like in the movies. She had a pretty face framed by long, golden hair that fell in two smooth curves onto the shoulders of her jacket.

"We didn't know anybody was here," the boy said.

"This your house? Does it matter if somebody's here?" Mo walked toward the pair. His approach caused them to move their limbs with considerable restlessness, as if their arms and legs would run off without permission if they could. He realized he must look like a demon of sorts, gun in hand, panting slightly, sweating. "Put your goddamned hands down."

The girl's hands flew down to her sides. "We're sorry, we didn't know anybody lived here anymore."

"You didn't notice the nice new gate at the bottom of the driveway?"

Again it was the girl who spoke. "We came through the woods—there's a sort of a path. To where we live."

"You can call my dad," the boy volunteered. Mo felt embarrassed for him: Moments ago, he'd no doubt been a real cowboy hotdog daredevil. Now he was a cringing piece-of-shit juvenile.

"You're trespassing. What were you doing in there, throwing things?"

"I'm sorry," the boy said. He looked more frightened than the girl.

"Everything was like this already." He gestured around at the chaos, guiltily, as if Mo wouldn't believe him. "Are you going to arrest us?"

Mo couldn't help himself. The little shits deserved it: "What makes you think I'm a policeman?" he asked, smiling evilly.

Their eyes widened as a new gust of fear blew into them.

"Relax," Mo said, putting his gun away. "You're in luck. I'm with the New York State Police. No, I'm not going to arrest you. But I want your full names and addresses, and your parents' names."

He wrote down the information. They lived in the new yuppie development down the hill toward Golden's Bridge. Mo felt sorry enough for the boy that he decided to spare him the embarrassment of asking what they had come to Highwood for. She was a pretty girl, doe-eyed, sweet sixteen. No point in rubbing the boy's nose in shit in front of her.

"How often have you kids come up here?"

They looked quickly at each other. "We never did before," the boy said.

"Yeah? Then how come you thought nobody lived here anymore?

How'd you know it was already like this?"

"It's just, we live not far away," the girl said. "In Briar Estates. All the kids know."

"Fine. So, how often have you come here before?"

They looked at each other again. "Once or twice."

"Which is it? Once? Or twice?"

"Just once," the girl said decisively.

"When was that?"

"I guess September," the boy said.

"We just started going together in September," the girl explained.

She was looking for sympathy. A smart kid. Knew her resources well.

"Was it like this when you were here before?"