Skull Session (9 page)

When the accident scene team arrived, they found the guy's body at the end of a trail of blood and body parts almost a hundred feet long. He had apparently been struck hard by the first car or truck or whatever, hard enough to kill him and sever one leg. Then the Rosens had come along and the body had been dragged beneath their car, rebounding between the pavement and the vehicle's undercarriage, probably getting "processed" by the tire, up and around a wheel well. So when poor Betty and Theodore had looked back, they saw a tangled heap of soft wet stuff, 180 pounds of chopped liver with some gristle in it. No, Mo would skip the photos.

When Betty Rosen had become coherent enough to be interviewed, she estimated that she'd seen the body in the headlights for less than two seconds before her car hit it. She further testified that some dismemberment had already occurred—she had seen "two lumps" in the road. The accident team's report verified that the Rosens had struck Mason when he was already dead, and that in fact his left leg had already been separated from his torso prior to the Taurus's impact. The ME's report also said there was some alcohol in Mason's blood, 0.06, a mild drunk, which concurred with friends' testimony that he'd downed a couple of beers earlier. The Rosens had been cleared of any wrongdoing.

The problem for Mo was that the body bore no clues about the vehicle that had done the killing—no automobile trim or rust or paint, no telltale wounds, and, most disappointing, no tire tracks other than the Rosens' in the blood fan. And none of the standard means for locating a hit-and-run had revealed anything: No car body shops had reported suspicious damage or tissue residues. No tips had come in to the anonymous hotline the county maintained. And at almost four months after the fact, they never would. The incident was a good candidate for the dead letter office.

Mo looked at the photo he had clipped to the folder, which showed the victim with his mother, father, and younger sister standing in front of a fireplace. Apparently the father was some exec at IBM, so the family did all right. The sister appeared much younger, around twelve, a plain girl with an awkward mouth and thick glasses. Somewhat strained smiles all around. The younger Mason had just returned from college in Syracuse and was staying with the family until he got a job or otherwise figured out his life. With his well-fleshed body, his tailored suit, his big face and thick lips, he looked a typical young man of his generation: a bit spoiled, a bit ashamed of his inability to live up to expectations, a bit resentful of his parents' generosity and the emotional strings attached to it. The little sister had a history of psychological problems, and her brother's death had apparently really set her back. No doubt, like any family, they were often more aware of the daily tensions and pressures, the little feuds and grudges, than the important bonds that really mattered. It's a shame, Mo thought, how often it took something like this to make people remember their priorities.

Mo closed the file, spun his chair to look at the hood of a blue pickup parked in front of his window and at the gray day outside, then spun back and opened another folder.

The missing kid thing was another situation entirely, not one to put away yet. At least four local high-school kids had disappeared from the area during the last few months. There were some signs that their disappearances were connected—they had vanished during the same period of two months, a couple of the kids had known each other slightly at school—but this was speculative. Wild Bill had run a File 6 check on NYSPIN, the New York State Police Information Network, and had met with an interagency task force, but nobody had gotten anywhere. Wild Bill's idea, which the Westchester district attorney's office shared, was that the whole business was probably nothing more than an epidemic of running away from home among the well-off but rebellious upper-Westchester County teenagers. For Bill it had been a good excuse not to push the case.

Wild Bill's theory appeared to have been borne out by recent developments. Originally, they'd thought five teenagers were missing, but in a lucky coup for his first week on the job Mo had located one of the kids. By talking to friends and girlfriends, Mo had figured out enough of the family dynamic operating in this case to make a few deductions. It was typical divorce stuff, which Wild Bill should have known—the kid had turned up at a relative's house in Pennsylvania. The case was now what it should have been from the start: just another ugly custody battle, pricey gladiators battling in a walnut-paneled arena, making everybody's life hell.

But that still left four kids. All were between the ages of fifteen and eighteen, and all had disappeared within a seven-week period during August and September. It was the times of their various disappearances that interested Mo most.

For two of the kids, pinning down the exact date of disappearance had proven impossible. It had to do with family structure and the values prevalent in Westchester County, New York, USA, in the late twentieth century.

One kid, Mike Walinski, came from a very well-off family in which the parents didn't keep track of their son's comings and goings. The kid had his own car, his own apartment above the garage; the parents had a busy social calendar, traveled a lot, spent nights away, left the kid on his own. In general, Mo had decided, they pursued their careers and their various indulgences with more diligence than they applied to their parenting. When Wild Bill tried to establish exactly when Mike had gone missing, the parents admitted that there were problems in the family, they hadn't seen much of Mike lately. They justified their inattention by claiming a great respect for the kid's need for indepen- dence. They had returned late at night from three days on the West Coast, hadn't seen Mike that night, although his car was in the garage. It was only after two more days that they got concerned enough to call the police. As a result, nobody could pin down exactly when Mike disappeared. At eighteen, Mike was the oldest of the missing teenagers. He was an only child, just graduated from JFK High School.

The second kid's background was very different, but the end result was oddly similar. Steve Rubio was fifteen and lived alone with his father, an alcoholic who held temporary landscaping and repair jobs and barely scraped by. Strange, Mo thought, how the family structure of both rich and poor, highly educated and uneducated, could end up being so similar. Mo wouldn't be surprised to find that these kids had run away, and he couldn't blame them either.

But the other two kids' parents had called the same days their kids had gone out and not come back, so it was easy to ascertain when they had last been seen. Essie Howrigan was sixteen, a pretty girl according to the class photo Bill had procured for her file. Her parents had last seen her on the evening of August 6, when they went out with some friends to a movie. The boy was Dub Gilmore, real name Allen Jr., who was also sixteen and had just completed his sophomore year at the high school. Lived only a mile from the Howrigans, but the two families didn't know each other. Dub had taken off around seven weeks later than Essie, in mid-September. To Mo, these two kids didn't fit the profile of probable runaways. The parents certainly didn't think so, and the local papers had made a thing of it for a while. In his file were a half dozen newspaper clippings, some about the disappearances, some about the community meetings at which dozens of parents had spoken about the "teen crisis," social fragmentation, erosion of the family, etc. The BCI school liaison officer came to talk about "normlessness," the current big buzzword at the Bureau. For all Mo's cynicism about the jargon, he tended to agree with what they said.

Mo checked his watch, closed his files, left the building. Outside, a breeze blew through the parking lot, carrying a chill as if it had blown off the ice-cube subdivision on the distant slope. He was glad to get into his car.

Driving to the town of Purdys, he thought about the case some more. The individual cases came together into a pattern in that the dates fit into two clusters. Mo had filled in a calendar, marking the days when Essie and Dub had disappeared, then shading in a band of days when it was probable Mike and Steve had gone. Essie's X fell on August 6, in the middle of the period when it was likely Mike had vanished; Dub's X filled in September 19, at the tail end of Steve's band. It was suggestive.

His next job was to explore the possibility of links between the kids. In his notebooks, he had started to draw a tinkertoy pattern, four circles representing each kid, with lines connecting them—knew each other, went to school together, friends in common, overlapping interests. So far, there weren't many connecting lines.

Today's interviews were the ones he'd decided were most likely to give him something useful: the families of Dub Gilmore and Essie Howrigan. These were parents who could be expected to know something about their kids' lives, who had demonstrated enough concern to call the police right away.

Mo checked the Gilmores' Briar Estates address in his notebook, found the number on a mailbox in front of a recently built two-story house, one with some architectural flourishes, stylishly faced in brown clapboards. Each tree in the yard was surrounded by a neat circle of redwood bark. When did that fashion start? More to the point, he wondered, when would it pass? A professionally maintained yard, a Honda Accord station wagon parked in the drive: Mo decided that the Gilmores were doing all right.

Before turning into the driveway, he glanced at the dashboard clock. Ten minutes to one—he was early. It wasn't a good idea to be early for an interview like this, when families needed to brace themselves. He turned up the heater another notch and continued past the house, out the Lewisboro Reservoir Road, along the bottom of the reservoir.

It was pretty country up here. He remembered coming fishing with his parents to one or another of these reservoirs when he was a kid, and loving it. In the last twenty years, the landscape had changed as the commuter population burgeoned and old farms and woodlots were sold off as subdivisions. Yet on a day like today, when the bare trees were gaunt and dark, when the wind seemed to press the water of the reservoir into a flat slate-gray sheet, he could still feel the way it had been. There was still the feel of Washington Irving's Catskills here—hoary old woods, meandering tumbledown stone walls, dark, shingle-faced houses barely visible through the trees.

Mo checked the time again and pulled into a wide driveway to turn around. Two squat pillars of mossy stone flanked a wrecked car that had been placed to block access to the driveway, which rose steeply away from the road and disappeared into the trees. Another of the old family homes, most likely run on hard times, estate litigation, or generational transitions. By next year or the year after, there'd be more neat houses clustered here, marked by a stylish sign: Saxony Village or Briarwood Manor. Something cute, pretentious, and Anglo. Mo chided himself for his cynicism, then pulled a U-turn back toward the Gilmores' house.

9

M
RS. GILMORE WAS A SHORT WOMAN, around forty, with a washed-out look: wispy blond hair in a cloud of curls, a pale face, no lipstick. Her husband was already in the living room when they came in, standing and pretending to read a newspaper, clearly too nervous to sit down. Mr. Gilmore was tall and thin, slighdy hunched, with dark, thinning hair and a look of both weariness and hostility. He shook hands with Mo, a hard, quick grip, his eyes never leaving Mo's face. Mo wondered how much the last two months had changed the way these people looked.

"Please sit here, Mr. Ford," Mrs. Gilmore said, gesturing at an armchair near a fireplace. They had prepared for his visit: Two other chairs were drawn up to make a neat triangle. "Can I get you some coffee?"

Mo hesitated, then assented. If it would help put Mrs. Gilmore at ease, he'd sit there with coffee at his elbow, although he didn't really want to drink any. He wished he'd eaten some lunch.

"You have a fine house here," he said. "This is a very nice area."

"Well, we once thought so," Mr. Gilmore said.

"My family is from Scarsdale. We used to come up here to go fishing. I always liked it up here." Mo felt as if everything he said was the wrong thing, each statement wounding Mr. Gilmore. He was glad when Mrs. Gilmore reappeared with three cups of coffee on a tray, served him, and sat down.

"Mr. and Mrs. Gilmore," Mo said, "let me begin by repeating what I said on the telephone: I'm not here to tell you anything new. I'm here to find out what I can, hopefully to find something that can help us locate Dub. Detective Avery has retired, and I'm taking over this case. If I ask you things he's already asked you, I'm sorry, but please try to answer as completely as you can. Something may come to mind that didn't when Detective Avery spoke to you."

Mrs. Gilmore nodded encouragingly. In Mo's limited experience, parents of kids involved in crimes, either as victims or perpetrators, tended to have one of two attitudes toward police: either angry and accusatory, or apologetic and embarrassed. It looked as if he had one of each in the Gilmores.

"I don't know if Detective Avery made it clear the way we're viewing this situation."

"He told us some other kids from the area had disappeared," Mrs. Gilmore said. "That maybe the disappearances were connected."

"It's suppositional, but yes. So my goal is to talk to you and the other parents—"

"With all due respect to the other families," Mr. Gilmore broke in, "I want to see someone working for
our
kid. For
us.
We had one detective, one old
rummy,
frankly—"

"Dear," Mrs. Gilmore cautioned. She looked to Mo for sympathy.

Her husband was just getting going. "—one old rummy trying to find five or six kids. Now we've got you, a new guy coming in cold, doesn't know a goddamned thing about the case—"

Mrs. Gilmore raised her voice, surprising Mo. "Allen!" She turned to Mo again, almost in tears. Mr. Gilmore subsided, chastened. Mo cleared his throat. "Let me see if I can address your concerns. First of all, yes, I'm new in the area, but I think there's a certain advantage to having a fresh pair of eyes to look at things. Second, there's an advantage to working on related cases as a group. With your son's disappearance alone, we don't have much to go on. But if you add information from the others, you might see a pattern. Third, I'm not really alone on this. We've got an interagency task force with some very sharp people on it, and I assure you, your son's disappearance is high on the agenda."

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."