by Daniel Hecht
Despite the buzz of concern, having the detective at the house had been the best part of an otherwise miserable day. It had started with his call to Janet. After a nearly sleepless night worrying, he'd tried Janet's number first thing Thursday morning, standing in the ruined kitchen, seething with tics brought on by the anticipation of talking to her.
"Janet? Paul. I'm glad I finally managed to get through. How are you? How's Mark?"
"I'm fine. Mark had another bad day on Tuesday." Her voice was flat, revealing nothing.
"How bad?"
"Micropsia, withdrawal. This is the second time in ten days. The one before that was about the same."
"Which means that the interval is shortening up again. Christ!" Paul said. "I wish I were up there to work with him. I miss him."
That managed to put a chill in her voice. "I'm sure," she said.
Paul rang the invisible bell. "Well, it's going well down here. I think we're on schedule for—"
"Paul, I've been talking to an attorney."
He stopped, shifted gears. "So I gather. And to my aunt. Care to tell me why?" He resisted slipping a jab in with his question. She'd only escalate it, and right now he needed her to stay reasonable. If it came to a struggle over Mark, Janet had him at a disadvantage in every way. He was cohabiting with another woman, hving outside Mark's school district, unemployed. He didn't have her family money or connections to draw upon—in his current state, he couldn't begin to match her ability to stick out a legal battle. Unspoken, whenever she listed his failings, was his Tourette's. She'd use it if she could. Could a court find him unsuitable because he had a neurological disorder? How well could he control his tics and coprolalia at a custody hearing?
"I'm just exploring the issue at this point," she said.
"What issue is that, precisely?"
"Don't play the naif, Paul, please. Really, it's your most irritating habit. The issue of the rights and obligations we each assume with regard to Mark."
"Meaning custody." "I'm just doing the research I should have done years ago."
"So why'd you call my aunt?"
"I didn't call your aunt. I called your current employer—on the advice of my attorney. Your long-term financial viability, what you make and what you can pay, it all factors in. I wanted to hear it from the horse's mouth."
Paul wanted to fling the phone away from him, smash Janet's condescension and arrogance against the wall. "Why do you want to do this? You know that I love my son, that he loves me and needs me. You know I've been working very hard to figure out what's the matter with him, and we've goddamned well been making progress. You know I'm doing everything I can to make money."
"No doubt. But you don't seem to manage to make money and live nearby at the same time, do you? Any 'progress' you might've been making seems to be slipping away, doesn't it?"
"I'll come up next week."
"I've got to get going now," she said.
"I'll come up Sunday. I'm hoping I can get a gate up by then, I'll have subcontractors in the house all day—I'll be able to get away. You and I can talk. I'll have Mark out at the farm for a couple of days." Paul's knuckles ached from gripping the receiver.
"Maybe. We'll see."
"Janet, why- do you want to do this?" He spoke in a gentle voice, sincerely trying to reach her. "Please, don't use Mark as a weapon to hurt me."
"Don't flatter yourself," she hissed.
Paul wrestled with the conflicting impulses in him, and at last the dammed-up anger washed over him. "Janet. You listen to me: Don't try to come between me and my son. Don't even consider it. You think you have all the cards in your pocket? The legal shit doesn't mean squat to me. I'll do whatever I have to."
"Let me see—is that a threat? Oddly enough, my attorney mentioned just such a possibility. He said I should make a note of any violent or threatening behavior on your part." Her self-control was astonishing.
"You heard me. I'll be up Sunday. Have Mark ready to come home with me Monday after school." He would have gone on, but Janet had cut the connection.
Paul stirred in the sleeping bag, squirming with tension. His arms and legs moved independently, little tics in every muscle group. Next to him, Lia turned a page, absently stroking his chest with one hand.
Then, after the call to Janet, the thing with Rizal. Paul had been pacing up and down in the crisp air, working out the kinks he'd acquired from stooping over Vivien's papers, when the cruiser came over the crest of the drive. Pazal swaggered out of the car, chewing a toothpick.
"I've already registered a complaint about your last visit," Paul warned him.
"Yeah, Miller said you called. He said, 'Take a good close look at this guy Skoglund.' So I thought I'd drop by again. Actually, I'm here to do you a favor."
"What's that?"
"You're from Vermont, right? Still hippie heaven up there? Food coops and farm communes? Grow your own, do you? Green Mountain Green—I hear it's very nice."
"I'm not understanding you. What's the favor you're here to do?"
Pdzal came to the bottom of the stairs and spoke conspiratorially "There's been speculation about drugs happening up here for some months now. Recent talk at zone headquarters is that you're bringing down some Vermont homegrown for sale to our Westchester County kids. So the favor is this: I'm giving you a little advance warning. A chance to clear out."
"I've got to get back to work, Rizal. Come on up and search the place. You won't find anything. But you make sure you have a warrant, because if I see you up here without due authority again, on any pretext whatsoever, I'll bring you to court."
Rizal didn't budge. "Funny—you can always manage to find something if you're really looking for it."
"You mean if you want to nail somebody, you bring it with you."
Pdzal just looked at him, eyes flat.
Paul had started walking away, back toward the kitchen door. He'd suppressed any vocal tics, but his abdomen was clenching spasmodically. If the cop wasn't off the property by the time he got to the kitchen phone, he was calling the State Police headquarters. And then a lawyer.
"But here's another thing to consider, Mr. Skoglund," Rizal called after him. "It won't make things easier for you if there's an investigation, will it? I mean, how do you think your aunt will hke it if you're even accused? If we have to go through her little castle with a fine-tooth comb? And how fast do you think your work will go if you're tangled up in something hke that? Interrogations, making bail, lawyers, hearings, court dates—my guess is it will not go well. My guess is you can't afford a headache like that. So I'm giving you the chance to get lost. Go home. Tuck fanny and scoot."
Paul didn't pause or turn around. He didn't want Rizal to see that he'd finally touched a nerve. Not so much that there'd be problems with Vivien, or the job. Highwood and everything connected with it could go to hell. But a drug charge now, no matter how bogus—Janet would love it. She'd eat him alive in any legal battle. Good-bye to Mark.
"Paul! Paul!" Lia was shaking him, scattering kisses on his face. "Are you all right? You were moaning as if you were having a bad dream!"
"Yeah, a nightmare—I was thinking back on the day."
"You were grinding your teeth! You've never done that before."
"What's that splat-splat noise? The sound of shit hitting the fan?" Paul moaned and put his head between his hands. "Oh, baby, what's going on? Why is all this happening? What am I supposed to do?"
Lia wrapped her arms around him. "It's going to be all right. I promise." She kissed him beneath his ear. "It's going to come out fine."
"How? What am I supposed to do? It seems like everyone around me is nuts."
"Me too?"
"No. Not you." He put his forehead against her. "But recently, so help me, I've been thinking I'm going crazy."
"You're the sanest person I know! You've got to be nuts to think you're crazy."
"Explain to me how sane I am—I seem to have forgotten."
He expected more humo
r, but she took him seriously: "I'll tell you exactly. You remain honest when everyone else is being deceitful. You are compassionate in a time when selfishness is everywhere. You've got the best brain of anyone I know, yet you still steer by your heart. You keep a sense of humor, even if things are difficult."
It was good to hear her flatter him. "Yeah, well, neither my heart nor my humor has been helping me recently. How're they supposed to help me with this Pdzal character? Fuck it—I need a forked stick and a canvas bag for that son of a bitch."
Lia laughed, still wrapped around him.
"And I didn't even tell you about Dempsey," he went on.
"I thought you'd cleared that up."
"Ah, fuck—I think there's still something going on with him." He told her what he hadn't had time to earlier: That afternoon, Paul had found Dempsey upstairs in Vivien's bedroom, furtively rooting through the papers just as Lia had described earlier. Paul had slipped past the doorway without Dempsey's seeing him, but the implication was clear—the old man was still looking for something.
Lia looked lost in thought for a moment, then stretched and yawned hugely. "I think you're getting worried about things that probably aren't very important. So Dempsey has something else he'd like to keep private—so what? How does that affect Paul Skoglund? Anyway, problems are just opportunities to grow, learn more about ourselves."
"Recently I've had about all the personal growth I can stand," Paul grumbled.
Lia slept. Paul lay, straining to hsten to the night through the sound of her gentle snores. Night wrapped the carriage house, the rugged woods seemed to breathe too. The yellow candlelight set into sharp focus tiny irregularities in the paint on the ceiling, like the pocks and craters of the moon.
A humid, hickory smell in the air. Out in the woods with the big dog. Mother packed a snack, a sandwich and a whole Cracker Jack box, all wrapped in the special blue handkerchief. The woods strange with the bright uneven light, the mist. Vivien gone to town in her Land Rover car that smells like leather inside.
The house feels empty without Father, who had work to do, and without Freda who is gone away forever but you're not supposed to talk about it because it makes Vivien too sad.
Resting on the bare granite boulder, watching ants, then staring upward. The rough rock gives off heat like some big friendly living thing. The deep sky is hung with little puffs of clouds like Indian smoke signals, their meaning mysterious. Movingfarther on. A flock of startled crows rises and spirals in the air like ashes from afire, then blows away into the valley. Then the dog stops to perk his ears, uncertain. A chugging noise, down below in the thick tangle of vines and brambles. Scared now but going closer, hearing the thrash of dried leaves, crackle of twigs. Something's moving behind a ledge of rock, then out again, in and out, back and forth, a white-pink shape, two pink shapes, wrong against the woods colors. A sapling-top jerks suddenly, then stops, then thrashes again, shaking loose a scatter of leaves. Backing away, afraid to run, starting to turn. Tripping over something, dropping the bag with the snack in it, wanting to go back for the handkerchief but too afraid. Can't look. The horrible convulsive back and forth, the hissing-chugging, the pink and red and black. The awful blind energy of it, like animals fighting. Running away now but still hearing it, the fast rhythmic noise like a knife being sharpened. A bad secret thing that you don't talk about. Running, scrabbling away. Looking back in terror, seeing the top of the sapling heave and thrash and shiver loose its leaves.
38
MO SAT AT his desk, his office dark but for the desk lamp and the glow of his computer screen. Coming in after normal office hours, he had spotted Tommy Mack in the main office, talking on the phone and intently chewing his nails, but otherwise the BCI side was empty. He had come away from his meeting with Lia and Paul so full of jangled ju-ju energy he could hardly contain himself. Partly it was the possibilities that emerged from what they'd told him. Partly it was Lia. Trying to name the feeling, he discarded excited in favor of inspired. He felt like an idiot, a kid. He wanted to show off for her, bring her presents—which meant, in this case, to develop the leads they'd offered him.
But first one little errand. Apollonian or Dionysian? she'd asked. The answer was both complex and simple: a cop, Lia, suspicious by nature, paranoid through experience. Sorry, folks, just a precaution. At his computer, he called up NYSPIN and punched in the names Paul Skoglund and Lia McLean. No arrest records or warrants, not even a moving violation. Okay. Next he typed in a vehicle registration request, using the car license numbers he'd made a point of noting before leaving the driveway at Highwood. The old MG was indeed registered to a Paul Skoglund, of Norwich, Vermont, the Subaru wagon to one Lia McLean, same address. Finally, he called the Providence police and was able to confirm that Ed McLean was an investigator in the department—a lieutenant, in fact. So they were what they appeared to be.
Next he called the number Paul had given him for his aunt in San Francisco. As he'd promised, he didn't mention that he'd been to the lodge or had met Paul, only that he was working on a case involving missing teenagers and the lodge seemed to figure in.
"I understand that the premises have been badly vandalized. What I'd like, ma'am, is your permission to conduct a forensic investigation of the house to see if the teenagers in question had been up there at any time."
The woman's voice was brittle, icy. "I presume that your request for a consent search means that you are unable to convince a judge that your suspicions merit issuing a search warrant. Am I correct?"
She didn't leave much wiggle room. "That's essentially true, Mrs. Hoffmann, but only because I'm in the preliminary stages—"
"Mr. Ford. Please don't waste your breath. You have offered me no persuasive reason to permit my house to be invaded, during my absence, and my things tossed about yet again. I'm afraid I have standards of privacy at least as high as the local courts. If and when you are able to obtain a search warrant, I will of course be happy to comply. Until then, I am sorry. You may not enter my property without legal authorization."
Mo felt hke telling her that if he got a warrant he'd search the house whether she was happy to comply or not. But this was the kind of tough old rich buzzard who knew how to make major trouble for you. He'd avoid confrontation with her for now. He thanked her for talking with him and said good-bye. Cross that possibility off the list.
The next phase of this night's work was more complex. A wild thought had occurred to him, prompted by the sight of that sink lodged in the wall. He hadn't been willing to mention the thought to Lia and Paul, not without a hell of a lot more to back it up.
Mo opened his file on the hit-and-run death of Richard Mason. For the first time, he spilled the photos out on his desk. He took a deep breath, then pulled over the swing-arm desk lamp so the photos were spotlighted against his blotter.
Ten black-and-whites, a dozen color shots, all eight-by-tens. The body of Richard Mason was caught in its final pose on the asphalt of Highway 138, brightly lit by arc lamps. In one mid-range shot, his blood-slimed face—or rather the remains of it, since part of the skull was missing—was against the road surface, almost upside down on an unnaturally elongated neck. He'd ended up wearing his abdominal organs like a ghasdy cape over his shoulders. Another shot showed the corpse from behind, with the bloodied shirt stretched empty on the pavement, still partly tucked into the waistband of the blue jeans he'd been wearing.
Mo looked away, covering the photos with a blank legal pad as if to protect himself from their noxious emanations. He wasn't an expert at forensic pathology, so he didn't expect to pick up anything but a general sense of the accident from the photos. An intuitive sense. Once he'd gotten his breath again, he looked at a few more photos. There was one of the initial impact site, where Richard's right lower leg lay in a broad smear of dried blood. Another gave a good view of the ninety-foot trail between the initial impact site and the body, a tangled calligraphy of blood, pieces of cloth, and unnameable lumps.
In ju
st the few minutes he'd been looking at the photos, he'd gotten a throbbing headache, and the light felt like a dagger driven into his eyes. Mo put the photos away and oriented the light away from him. He lifted out the accident scene report, read the reconstructionist's report carefully.
Bernie Denning had received specialized training to be able to look closely at a vehicular incident, especially a vehicle-pedestrian collision, and reconstruct the sequence of events. Using his own observations at the scene, the M.E.'s medical report, photos, charts, computer analysis, and Betty Rosen's testimony, Denning had put together a picture of what had happened. Victim hit by at least two vehicles. Second vehicle known to be a Ford Taurus station wagon, which had rolled Pdchard's body beneath its undercarriage, causing innumerable fractures of bones and detaching various body parts. Embedded in the corpse were chips of rust, some mud and oil residue, all found to have belonged to the Taurus. Patterns of tissue residue on the Taurus's oil pan, floorboards, and both left wheel wells told the story of the body's passage beneath it, consistent with the driver's account. Comparative absence of blood at the second site resulted from the fact that the corpse had drained at the first impact site, where it had lain for less than half an hour.
Accurate reconstruction extremely difficult due to double impact and extremity of injuries.
Denning had found the absence of indications about the nature of the first vehicle to be unusual, although not without precedent. In his view, the lack of mud, rust, or oil suggested that the vehicle in question had been new. Given the absence of paint, plastic, or glass, the victim had probably not been struck by a grill, hood, or fender; it was possible that he'd been horizontal when first hit, or had thrown himself under the vehicle. Denning felt that the only vehicle that could have accomplished such extreme damage was a truck with tandem axles and double wheels or, possibly, a piece of road construction equipment.
Denning's conclusion, a best guess, was that Pdchard had been knocked down by a tall, wide tire and then "processed" by multiple wheels which churned him up and under in an exceptionally clean wheel well, either brand-new or recently washed. The most problematic aspect of the whole thing had been the absence of tire tracks from the first vehicle. In his summary, however, Denning cited a similar case near Buffalo, in which the badly damaged corpse of a woman had puzzled investigators until a guilt-ridden local grading contractor had come forward with his brand-new front-loader.