Skull Session (37 page)

45

A
FTER A MONDAY MORNING TALK with Barrett in which the basset-faced senior investigator made it clear that he wanted reports on various other cases, Mo worked on everything but High-wood. To his surprise, he found that looking at the other cases was refreshingly uncomplicated, real-world. The whole tangle of missing kids and pathological violence and big old empty houses and schizophrenic girls had created an aura of weirdness around the Highwood case. It was good to come back to Earth.

On Tuesday, when he finally took a few hours to run down some details on Highwood, he found his outlook much improved. Dealing with good old, straightforward greed and dishonesty had reminded him of some useful truths. At bottom, he decided, he was a traditionalist who believed in the meat and potatoes of investigation: motive, opportunity, means. Give him MOM every time. Mostly people did things because they wanted the green stuff. Money. So who stood to gain from the destruction at Highwood?

At the Mt. Kisco library, he found a copy of
Hoover's Handbook of
World Business
and looked up Royce Hoffmann. Hoffmann was listed in association with two corporations: Pacific Development, which lent money to other companies with interests in Asia and the Pacific Rim, and Star Technologies, an outfit with offices in Europe and Malaysia. He wondered how many others Royce might be involved with.

Money: Star Technologies made a lot of it, sales around $750 million. On the other hand, Star had several thousand employees. Pacific Development was possibly as lucrative or more so: Being a lender, its sales were not listed, but it had to be substantial to warrant a listing. And it had only twenty-three employees.

Of course, it added up to nothing.

Mo thought back to his meeting with Lia and Paul. Something Paul said had struck him. "I just keep feeling it's connected to the
past"
he'd said. "To something when I was a kid. A gut feeling." It was the way he said it, the groping, inward-looking, troubled yet certain pronouncement Mo had learned to value in interviews. And the idea was backed up, possibly, by the photos Lia had shown him, the KKK photos. Clearly some sort of major violence had happened at the lodge years ago. Mo put the photos at thirty years old. Had Vivien called the police back then, as she had on Falcone, the gardener? Was there a way to find records that old?

An angle occurred to him, a way to find out about the earlier violence. Every call to either state or local police was entered into the dispatcher's blotter—an actual ledger, handwritten moment-by-moment to record complaints or requests for assistance, and the office's response. Local State Police barracks kept blotters for five years, then either put them in storage or destroyed them. Handling of old blotters by township police departments varied town by town.

The Lewisboro and North Salem police claimed they kept their blotters at the station level for fifteen years and then incinerated them.

But Wild Bill had told him that in fact many old blotters from regional departments had survived.

"There're these little old ladies in the Putnam-Westchester Historical Society who like to save everything," Bill had said. "I mean
everything.
I know because my wife is one ofthem. They've got feed orders from when the circuses were in the area, a hundred fifty years ago, phone books from when you only needed five numbers. They even collected the old blotters when the police were ready to get rid of them, put them in their attic. I guess they think of themselves as a sort of a time capsule, although who's going to want any of that crap I couldn't tell you."

The museum was a handsome cube of a brick building, late eighteenth century, near Lake Lincolndale: two stories of brick surmounted by a slate mansard roof with small round windows in it. Inside, Mo found an immaculate foyer with glowing wood floors and white walls, surrounded by glass-fronted cases displaying books, monocles, inkwells, quill pens. A gray-haired woman glanced up from the desk opposite the front door.

"Can I help you?" she asked. She looked as if she expected a stickup. "Well, I hope so," Mo said, smiling. "I'm doing some research, and everybody tells me that this is the place to find what I'm after. I can see they must be right."

The flattery seemed to work. "Oh yes. We have a very unusual collection. Is there a particular area—?"

"I understand you keep police blotters."

"Yes, we do. Just since 1950, though." The request seemed to disappoint her.

"That's perfect for me, actually. I'm really interested in the period of, say, 1960 to around 1965."

"You don't know the particular year?"

"No. I'd hoped I could, you know, browse through a few years' worth."

"Because I'm afraid some of our collection isn't very well organized. Documents of that sort, you see, we keep in the attic, and they're not very accessible. I'd be happy to get you down a volume, but you'd have to tell me which one."

"Oh, I wouldn't think of it, Mrs., uh—"

"Otis. Dorothy Otis."

"Pleased to meet you." Mo extended his hand and shook hers, a narrow bundle of bones. "I'm Morgan Ford. Mrs. Otis, I wouldn't think of bothering you to find the books for me. If you'll just show me where they're kept. I'll be happy to look through them myself."

"Just a minute, please," Mrs. Otis said. She went through a door into an office, where she consulted another old woman sorting papers into a file cabinet. The other woman tilted her head to look over her half-lens glasses at him.

"Don't you know who that is?" she whispered loudly to Mrs. Otis. "That's
Norman Mailerl"
Mo turned away, smiling. Only a faint resemblance, to book jacket photos of thirty years ago.

When Mrs. Otis returned, she smiled at him conspiratorially. "Come right this way, Mr. 'Ford.' I'll take you upstairs myself."

Mo followed her up a broad stairway and then up a narrower stairs to the attic. She opened a last door to reveal a large bare-raftered room, lit by rows of fluorescent lights and by the round windows Mo had seen from the outside. Along the walls, and in rows down the middle, were tables and shelves laden with books, stacks of papers, and cardboard boxes.

"I'm sorry, it's just a bit chilly up here," Mrs. Otis told him. She drew her sweater around her bony frame, then led him to a series of wooden shelves that bore hundreds of identical canvas-bound volumes. "Here you are. Lewisboro, Somers, North Salem blotters. The dates are on the spines. You can use this table. Now, if you get too chilled, you must come down for a cup of coffee. I'll start a fresh pot."

Mo decided to start looking at the Lewisboro blotters from 1960 and work forward from there. He pulled several, brought them to the table, and sat on the wooden stool provided. The blotters were meticulously dated, the hour and minute specified. He scanned rapidly, looking for names of people or places that sounded familiar. An hour later, after a couple of volumes, he got lucky: In July 1962, Mrs. Vivien Hoffmann of Highwood Lodge had called in with a complaint against her gardener, who she alleged had stolen some things and done damage to her property. The date supported what Paul and Lia had told him and corroborated what he'd heard from Falcone.

There was no more about the Hoffmanns or Highwood in that volume. He set it aside and opened the next, scanned through the pages. Here was the secret history of the area, he realized, the sad, sordid underbelly of the county. Car accidents, thefts, burglaries, fires, trees fallen across roadways, heart attacks, drownings, biting dogs, marital arguments, truant kids, drunkenness, violent assaults, petty mischief, smelly trash fires. All the mean and unpleasant stuff, distilled to an essence of pure misfortune, despair, squalor. You had to have a certain bent to be a cop, a cast-iron stomach for this stuff. Mo wasn't sure he had it.

By three o'clock he'd only gotten through 1963 and hadn't found anything on the Hoffmanns since his first lucky break. He was freezing to fucking death, about ready to call it a day. Clearly the good luck had passed on by again. He'd give it one more volume and then quit, try again some other time.

But then he got lucky again.
Very
lucky. This was better than he'd hoped. It explained a lot. For the first time, he felt he was maybe beginning to get a handle on the case.

Mo stood on the museum's granite steps for just a moment, breathing deep and letting his eyes adapt to the brighter light of the day. He wasn't yet sure what to do with what he'd found, but he would think of something. It would be a pleasure to tell Lia and Paul. Lia would think he was hot shit for thinking of the old blotters.

He'd found reference to the arrest of three teenaged boys, all under driving age, who had stolen a car and driven it around for a few hours until smashing it up on Route 100. The boys were brought into the station and held until their parents could come get them and sort things out with the owner of the car. One of the boys was Royce Hoffmann. One was a boy from Purdys, a name Mo had already forgotten; the other was that lifelong resident and local hero of Golden's Bridge, Pete Pdzal.

46

W
HILE MARK WAS AT SCHOOL on Monday, Paul accomplished five things. The first was to leave the bottle of haloperidol pills on the medicine-cabinet shelf, unopened. His first full day without any at all since that day in the woods so long ago. No big thing, no damned ceremony. Just no pills.

The second was more prosaic. The MG had been missing on a couple of cylinders, giving him the jitters about driving it as far as Westchester again. He cleaned the points and plugs and reset the timing, and was pleased that the motor ran smoothly again.

The third was a call to Charlie Gold, a friend who maintained a single-practitioner law office in Norwich. He was a lousy guitar player and a mediocre lawyer and a good person who had chosen his low-key way of life wisely. Charlie had a healthy distrust and dislike of lawyers.

"I need some legal advice," Paul told him.

"Uh-huh. Shouting obscenities in public? That sort of thing?"

"Not exactly. This is serious, Chaz." Paul explained the situation with Mark, Janet's recent threatening talk.

"I'm not the guy for this, Paul," Charlie said at last. "Way out of my league. Knowing Janet, she's probably seeing some high-priced friend of her old man's—Brown and Caslick or somebody. Hired killers who'd chop you and me both to pieces. You'd be advised to retain somebody hke that yourself."

"Any suggestions?"

"If you can't get Brown and Caslick, I'd say Perry Associates. High fees. But when it's your
kid
—" Paul sensed Charlie's shrug:
What else you
gonna do?

Paul jotted the name. "Any general advice?"

"Sure. Custody courts are conservative. Typical advice is, walk the straight and narrow. Get employed if you're not, stay employed if you are. Get a good, conservative suit to wear to court, one that says 'reliable.' Not that you've got long hair, but get a haircut anyway. Shacking up? Get married. If you've got a copy
of Playboy
in the house, even the swimsuit issue of
Sports Illustrated,
burn it. Drive at or below the speed limit. Brush and floss after every meal. You think I'm fucking kidding? I'm not."

Paul thanked him, promised to get together when his schedule eased up, then said good-bye. He got in a call to Jason Perry's office and was told by the secretary that Perry would return his call when he had the time. Her snooty tone made it sound like the custody business was booming, a real bull market.
Sign of the times,
Paul thought.

Afterward, he agonized for a while and then accomplished his fourth deed of the day. He went into the bathroom, opened the medicine cabinet, and took one milligram—half the dosage he'd been on for the last week. It was a compromise, somewhere between Charlie's straight and narrow and Damon's wild and woolly.

The fifth accomplishment: Dr. Stropes. Paul spent half an hour writing a letter that expressed his desire to learn more about HHK/ HHD, keeping his request as innocuous as he could manage. He gave Dempsey's address and phone number and the number at Highwood as the best places to reach him.

The letter didn't relieve the impatient compulsion to contact Stropes. He called Roosevelt Medical Research Institute, got patched through to Stropes's voice mail, and suddenly couldn't decide what to say.
I'm into
something strange, it feels urgent, and I hope maybe you can help
me
—

He stated his general interest again, left call-back numbers, and the moment he got off the line boomed out "Big Bad John!"

The tics betrayed his misgivings. And yet he couldn't deny that there was something morbidly intriguing about the whole idea: a power that lived in you, that broke through all conscious constraint and—what? What did it do with its freedom? It might be nice to know.

"Big Bad John," he said again, almost getting it right.

"You sound . . . troubled, nephew," Vivien said.

"Yeah, well. It's been a rough day." Paul stared at the wallpaper over the telephone desk in the farm's kitchen, wondering why he'd called her. Lia was upstairs, probably asleep. Mark was back at Janet's. Paul was exhausted, demoralized, as he always was after one of Mark's episodes.

"Are you having problems with the house?"

"No. We're pretty well on schedule. Actually, I'm at home—I've been in Vermont for the last couple of days."

"Aha." Vivien gave that a moment. "I take it that means you're wrestling with some of the . . . issues . . . that came up when we last spoke."

"My son had another of his seizures. It's always hard for me." Paul was surprised at himself. He'd told himself he was calling to ask Vivien some questions about the vandalism—about the KKK photos, at least. But he was too tired to muster any challenge to her. Anyway, he realized he'd called her for another reason entirely: that somehow Vivien was the sounding board he needed. Somehow at this point the Dragon Lady was the one person who might understand. Maybe it was her connection to Ben. Right now he felt lost in the job of being a father.

"Tell me," Vivien said sympathetically.

He told her: Monday afternoon, Paul had picked up Mark from school and they'd returned to the farm. Paul had sent him to his room to pack up his things, preparatory to returning to Janet's. Lia would be at Dartmouth until late, and he planned to have dinner and some relaxed time with Mark, just the two of them, before Janet came to pick up their son.

That was the plan, anyway.

When Mark returned to the kitchen, Paul talked casually as he cooked dinner, not noticing Mark's immobility until it was too late. Then he'd tried desperately to get Mark out of it. It was an unusual episode in that Mark went through the catatonic phase and into the violent phase in less than an hour. As he told Vivien about it, Paul winced at the memory of holding the writhing, kicking body. In the bruised muscles of his chest and stomach, he could still feel Mark's wrenching, convulsive movements, the struggles of the
thing
that Mark had become.

By the time Janet arrived, the fit was easing off. She came into the kitchen to see Paul sitting on the floor among the toppled chairs and broken dishes, holding Mark in a bear hug from behind. Mark came out of it crying heartbreakingly.

"You have my deepest sympathy," Vivien said. "It is a terrible thing to see a loved one in such distress. I know your father often spoke of his similar . . . concern . . . for you."

Paul said nothing for a moment. When Mark was leaving, he had burst into tears again and refused to let go of Paul: "Please, don't be away so long. It's scarier when you're not around." He was looking at Janet as he said it, as if he knew the real obstacle to being with his father was now her resistance.

Paul and Janet had locked eyes. "I've got to stay down there now, until the job is done," Paul told Mark, told Janet. "I've made a commitment. But you can come visit me there, stay at Dempsey's house. Would you like that?"

"Yes."

"If your mother agrees." Paul held her eyes until he knew she'd relented. Under the circumstances, she had little choice. Only when they settled on Mark coming down the following weekend did the boy let go of Paul.

When he walked them out to the car, Paul said good-bye to Mark and then walked around to Janet's window. "Janet. Honor Mark's desire to see me. Don't change our plans for next week."

"I promised my son, Paul," she'd hissed. "7 keep my promises." Paul came back from the memory. Vivien was saying something:

"Paulie, tell me this," she said. Her voice had dropped, intensified.

"How is Mark's physical health, generally?"

"He's prone to colds, little infections. Nothing serious."

"A lot of them? Is there a pattern to his getting sick? What I'm driving at is this: Is there any relation between his episodes and his minor illnesses? Frequency, intensity, duration?"

Paul couldn't really remember, but it seemed like a possibility. He was too tired to concentrate. But Mark's physician's records and his journal would reveal a pattern if there were one. "I'm not sure. Maybe. Why?"

"Just look into it. I have another request. Remind me of what diagnostic work you have done."

"We've done EEGs, CAT scans, MRIs. Nothing shows up."

"No PETs, no 18E fluorooxyglucose? How about SPECT?"

"No." These were new cranial imaging technologies, prohibitively expensive.

"What about blood work?"

"Standard full-spectrum tests, many times over. His blood is good."

"You checked for high levels of plasma tryptophan?"

Paul thought for a moment. "I believe so. As I recall, it was normal. You're asking about IED, intermittent explosive disorder, aren't you?

We've ruled it out."

"Very impressive, nephew! You do know your physiology, don't you?" Vivien's voice took on a hushed intensity, almost a whisper. "I have another suggestion, then: The next time Mark has an episode, get him in to draw some blood. Have them look for CRF levels. Look for ACTH levels. It's imperative you do it
while
he's having the seizure, or very soon after."

Corticotropic releasing factor was a "messenger" secreted by the hypothalamus that stimulated the pituitary gland to produce adreno-corticotropic hormone. ACTH in turn caused cortisol to be released into the bloodstream. Both were reactions to environmental stimulation or stress, producing a variety of bodily responses from rage to panic to sexual arousal.

"Right." Paul wrote down the words. "Why those?" He came close to asking her something else:
Is that something you learned from your own
secret son, Vivien?

"Just a theory of mine. I could be wrong, but it can't hurt to try, can it?
Do it,
Paulie. And let me know what they find."

Why not? He was reluctant to subject Mark to any more clinical work, but anything would be better than what he'd witnessed tonight.

Anything. It had been a relief to tell it all to Vivien, and there was even a glint of hope in her ideas, her theory. Maybe it was the grasping of a drowning man, but he needed to have hope that
something
would help.

Paul hung up, turned out the downstairs lights, trudged upstairs. If he were to ask the gods for one favor, he'd wish he could forget the sound of Mark's grating teeth, creaking and screeching in his skull as he'd writhed in Paul's arms four hours ago.