Skull Session (47 page)

"Which means he could be dead, or might not be."

"I'd say so, except that my guess is that he disappeared because his brother killed him, or had him killed. The way I see it, like you said, that's why your aunt transferred Erik III so many times—to keep Royce from locating him. But Royce succeeds in finding him, offs him, waits five years for the legal declaration of death, this June twentieth. First thing he does when the trust passes exclusively to him is fuck up this house, that's on around June twenty-second or twenty-thir4- His mother knows he's going to try something like that, gets scared, runs away to California." To Mo's frustration, Paul didn't react, just kept staring thoughtfully into the distance. "Personally, that's what I think we're dealing with here. But it looks to me like maybe you're not so sure."

"I've got a few problems with the scenario, yes. One, you talk about cycles of violence. But that's emotional violence, resulting from rhythms in the psychological or neurological states of the perpetrator. At the same time, you're trying to pin this whole thing on a deliberate, thought-out, long-term plot by Royce—instrumental violence." The inconsistency was so obvious that Mo felt stupid. Completely inconsistent psychological profiles. Some of the air went out of his theory. Suddenly depressed, he poured himself another cup of coffee, swished it through his teeth as if he could suck some immediate stimulus out of it.

"Okay," he said. "I don't have all the answers. But let me tell you one other little piece of research I did. I wanted to know when your aunt left here, exactly when, right? So I called the Roy ale Hotel in San Francisco, said I was your aunt's accountant. Told the clerk I needed her date of arrival at the hotel so I could put some numbers together for tax purposes. She checked in on June twenty-fourth, Paul, which not only ties in with the declaration of death but which also means she's got exactly one week to resume residence here. And don't think Royce doesn't know it—if I could get the date that easily, so could he. And the hotel records provide all the paperwork he'd need to prove she was gone."

No reaction. It was hard to tell if Paul was even listening.

"So let me tell you where I went with it," Mo went on, beginning to feel desperate. "I came here wanting to ask your help. See, I've got several problems here. Not only figuring out who did what, but how you catch and convict a guy like Royce. He's rich, I've got little or no concrete evidence against him, he's no doubt got a lot of pull. Or Rizal—how do I go about accusing a police officer? Plus, my investigation is pretty unofficial. How do I apprehend these guys?"

"I can see that would be tricky, yes."

"But the plan I have might help us there. Assume for a moment I'm right and Royce wants this place, or the money he could get for it. And he's not sleeping nights because his plan is maybe not going to happen because his cousin Paul has come out of nowhere to be a monkey wrench in the works. He's invested a lot in keeping his mother out of here. The deadline's coming up. What's he got to do?"

"He's got to mess the place up again. And he doesn't have much time. So what are you proposing?"

It was time for the hard sell. Mo laid it all out: how Paul and he would joindy approach Vivien, soonest, Saturday, tell her they knew what was going on, make clear the extent of the risk to her if she tried to return. Tell her that opening the place up for a forensic investigation would be a way to protect her. If she still refuses, Paul and Mo go to Barrett, insist there's evidence that crimes have been committed at the lodge. Paul as a relative, as a person intimate with the current condition of the house. And Paul goes with Mo to Inspection in Albany, about Rizal. Barrett agrees to throw it open for investigation, Inspection goes after Rizal, Rizal and Royce are frozen out of it, maybe the investigation turns up something to pin them with.

But the distant look had come over Paul again.

"I'm not sure, Mo," Paul said at last. "My situation is complicated too. This is my family. My aunt insisted I preserve her privacy, and I agreed. Plus, I've got some problems with my ex-wife, some child-custody shit coming up—I have to finish this job so I can get the rest of the money my aunt owes me. If you're wrong, it'll cost me."

"Cost you? Hey, if what I'm saying is right, and these guys are willing to kill people if they need to, why shouldn't they just take
you
out too? In fact, that's an important part of what we need to tell my supervisor—that a major crime is likely to be committed unless some action is taken."

Paul then shook his head minutely. "I can't decide right this minute, Mo."

"You can't wait forever, either. Royce and Pdzal've only got a few days. You can bet they're not going to wait."

"Give me until tomorrow morning. I'll make up my mind by then." Mo was frustrated, but it was better than nothing. They agreed that Mo would meet Paul at the lodge at ten in the morning, and they'd take it from there. Mo inspected the skull earring again, then put it down, wondering why it bothered him. He swigged the last of his coffee. Paul offered to drive him back to his car, but Mo declined, wanting one more look at the path to Briar Estates.

He walked down the hill, learning the path backward. The wind was still picking up and some heavier clouds were coming in. Mo moved in and out of the shadow of boulders, the tangle of fallen trees and tented vines. He slid on some loose rock and wished again he'd thought to wear the appropriate shoes. Something strange was working inside Paul, for sure. But he was a good guy—hopefully as often tomorrow they'd start breaking this thing open.

64

P
AUL STARED AT THE WALL OF Dempsey's guest bedroom, numb from fatigue. Friday night. Vivien was probably already on her way to New York. Dempsey and Elaine had sent him to bed, cleared the dishes, and now the house was quiet except for the faint sound of wind in the eaves. He'd gone to the Corrigans' for what was intended as a quick, late dinner but had nearly fallen asleep at the table. In his exhaustion, he'd been unable to contain a set of mimetic tics that aped Dempsey's hand gestures unflatteringly, and was relieved when Dempsey gave him a wink of understanding.

"Stay here tonight, Paul," Elaine had said. "A comfortable bed, a hot shower. I'll cook you a great breakfast."

"No. Got to get more work done tonight." Paul groaned, tried to rouse himself. His back ached from hours of stooping, of carrying pieces of furniture to the terrace railing and tossing them into the Dumpster he'd had brought up, of boxing up salvageable stuff.

Dempsey shook his head. "Paul, face it—you're beat. The amount of work you'd get done tonight won't make much of a difference with Vivien. Better you should be rested when you sit down with her to figure out what you need to do to finish up. You'll need a clear head more than another square yard of floor cleaned up. Think of Mark too—he doesn't need a father who's a smoldering hulk. Stay here."

Paul's elbow had slipped off the dinner table, bringing his head with it, startling him awake. Dempsey had stood him up and herded him into the bedroom. "No arguments," Elaine said firmly.

And now, paradoxically, he couldn't quite sleep. Despite his exhaustion, a current of anxiety ran through him, a relentless nervous energy.

On the bright side, he tried to remind himself, he'd made almost enough progress. When Vivien came, the lodge would have electricity, and glass in the windows. And maybe even heat: Becker had agreed to work Saturday and thought he'd be able to get the new furnaces running. The house would have intact plumbing, with running water in the kitchen and one functional toilet. Her papers would be sorted into file boxes. The downstairs rooms would be mostly cleared and swept, the salvageable stuff sorted for repair or disposal. The upstairs rooms would be still heaped with rubble, but that wasn't so bad: It would give her a better idea of what he'd been up against. Vivien would pay him what she owed him, and he'd be gone. He'd let her find someone else to do the rest of the work.

Dimly visible outside the windows, the trees swayed in a rising wind, and a fine windblown sleet hissed against the glass. Paul stood up, paced in a circle in the little room, his thoughts spinning. Lia and Mark. Got to tell them not to come down from Vermont.
Lia,
he'd say,
Royce is
returning, there's a cycle here and it's coming around, there's a window of afew
daysfor Royce to act to keep Vivien out of here, Mo's convinced people are getting
killed over this. There's a weird neurological condition
that
—No. Keep it simple:
I don't want you or Mark anywhere near Highwood.

Paul left the bedroom, walked through the darkened house to the phone on the kitchen counter, dialed the number of the farm, got a busy signal, hung up.

Still pacing, he went to the hallway, thumbed the rheostat switch for the ceiling lights, bringing them up just enough to look over Dempsey's little gallery of fight posters and handbills. Young Dempsey with the sloped, muscle-corded shoulders, the banded long muscles in his thighs, the lethal eye. He'd been one tough customer, a brawling Irish kid with a famous right hand.
The secret to a good punch is
converting, Dempsey had told him once.
At the last instant you put the entire weight and strength of
your body into it, from your toes on up you're rigid as a plank of wood at the
microsecond of contact. Boom, your guy goes down, every time. One of the great
lessons I learned from fighting, applies to any project: Learn to focus all your
mental or physical energy into a single point, into the job at hand.

Good advice, Paul thought, wondering how he could bring to bear his own mental energy. There was a pattern in it all, if he could just see the whole picture. At times it seemed close to resolving. So close. And it had nothing to do with the scenario Mo believed in. That's why he'd had to stall Mo. That's why the solutions Mo envisioned wouldn't work. That's why Paul couldn't just walk away from it.

Farther down the hall, he stopped in front of a little collection of framed photos. Most were of the very early days: Dempsey building his house, Dempsey and Ben and Aster, other people Paul didn't recognize. There was even a small portrait of Paul and Kay.

Paul stared at the ones of Ben, searching the face of his father, looking for whatever insight might be found in his level gaze, his square chin, the lines of his mouth. One photo showed Ben and Dempsey standing proudly on a massive tree trunk they'd just felled. Ben smiled a cocky grin and held one end of a seven-foot two-man saw.

Paul cut the lights and tried Lia again. Still busy.

The problem of the nature of the violence was that Mo's theory relied on two completely different motivational forces. Royce did it, or instigated it, because he's got plans for the estate. Yet there was a rhythm to the intervals of violence, a serial or cyclical pattern such as would result from a psychopathology. Royce's coming back right on schedule reinforces the serial theory; the serial theory, in turn, implicates Royce because he's returning just when another cycle is due.

No. It wasn't just bad psychology. It was bad logic, a tautology: Proposition A is proven by proposition B, which is proven by proposition A.

No anyway. His gut told him otherwise.

He needed to sleep, but his thoughts festered and gnawed and wouldn't quit. Severe akathisia. Maybe it was the coffee he'd been drinking. His nerves were jangled. He needed to do something physical, yet he was too tired, it was almost midnight. He paced in circles in the living room, rotating his shoulders, trying to get the tension out of them.

Why couldn't he quite choke down Mo's theory about Royce's motives, despite the evidence for it? Because Paul's instincts told him unequivocally that the root of it all lay in personality. The Hoffmanns were too wealthy and too complex to bother being involved in anything for purely material reasons. They were connoisseurs of mind games, of the kind of warfare of attrition and subterfuge that only families waged. Whatever or whomever this game involved, the key was to be found in the psychology of the players.

And how did Erik III fit into the equation? Did he? Was he dead, as the law had officially declared, or was he . . . what?
Out in the woods.
Half wild, living like the Leather Man, hugely strong, deeply angry, full of raging
sorrows like the wind outside now, prone to explosive violence. To HHK/HHD.
When his cycle came around, coming down to the lodge like a winter-starved bear,
ripping and rending.
Paul's neck hairs rose at the thought. It would explain a lot—Vivien's interest in neurology, her desire to draw Paul into her affairs, her curiosity about Mark, her contact with Stropes. Her willingness to stick it out year after year at the lodge. Yes, and her resistance to bringing the police in: still trying to protect her beloved but demented first son.

And Ben. Was the mystery of Ben's suicide connected? Had Royce killed Ben—was that what he'd been hinting? Unlikely: Royce would be too smart to let something like that come out. More likely it was just Royce's sadistic, manipulative impulse of the moment, finding what he knew would be a sensitive nerve in Paul. Or wanting to expose the tip of Vivien's affair with Ben, turn Paul against her.

Abruptly too tired to stand, he went back to the bedroom, sat on the bed again, listening to the wind noise rising in the trees, the thousand tiny creaks and groans of the house shifting minutely under the pressure of moving air.

The issue of instrumental versus emotional violence: Was the damage at Highwood the aftermath of the periodic explosions of some violent psychotic, or the carefully devised plan of someone who wanted the house or something in it? The question wasn't necessarily that simple. There was a precedent for the two combining, he realized. He'd just been talking about it with Dr. Stropes: the riddle of the berserkers. The same problem applied. Berserkers could plan to be in a battle, knew in advance how they'd respond, could enter their hyperkinetic, hyperdynamic killing mode at will. They'd put on their pelts, they'd stare crazily through the eyeholes of a bear skull, and they'd chop anyone who resisted them into squirming guts and chunks of bone.

Yes. And with that came several inferences. In his mind's eye he held up the possibilities and examined each one. He followed out his meandering thoughts until he jerked suddenly upright, aware that he'd started to fall asleep, had crossed the vague line between reflection and dreaming.

He stood and went back to the telephone, clumsily punched the number of the farm, got the busy signal once more. Maybe the lines were screwed up in some way, he was thinking, and suddenly he realized he'd been listening to the signal for a full minute or more. Too tired to stay up any longer. He'd call her first thing in the morning, tell, her not to come down. It would be better then anyway: He'd be better able to explain when he wasn't so exhausted.

Back in the bedroom, he turned out the lights, lay back on the pillow, feehng his own weight pulling him down, irresistible.
August 6th,
he thought,
September 19th, November 2nd.
Yes. A clotted warm darkness began to blossom inside him, consuming his mind, blotting out the swirling thoughts.

His last thought had to do with railroads. What was her name? Priscilla something.
Train tracks. Getting hit by a train. That was one of the
keys.
And then he was asleep.