She turned the paper over. Catching her eye at the bottom of the page was the headline: “Human Remains off Gloucester Identified.”
According to the story, a skull and a leg bone that had been pulled up by professional scallopers two months ago had been positively identified. She vaguely recalled reading about the discovery. Apparently the remains had been DNA-matched to a six-year-old boy from Tennessee.
Maybe he had been up this way on a summer vacation or a visit with relatives. The poor kid. There were boating accidents and disappearances every year, usually because people don’t check the weather reports and then get caught in storms.
The story went on to say how forensics experts from the medical examiner’s office in Boston originally were baffled by the mysterious holes in the boy’s skull.
On an inside page, where the story continued, was a schematic drawing of the skull showing the odd cluster of holes—two sets on the left side of the forehead just behind the hairline, and above the ear.
Experts still aren’t certain if the holes were made by marine organisms or had occurred before death.The cause of death has not yet been determined. However, forensic scientists estimate that the remains could have been in the water for over a year, leading some to conclude that the child had drowned.But according to Gloucester police who worked in conjunction with Tennessee authorities, the child’s disappearance was being treated as a kidnapping and homicide.
The story went on to say that the remains had been returned to the parents for burial.
Cindy stared at the diagram.
That strange boy who came into the ER the other night had scars on his head just like these. The poetry kid. The savant.
Brendan something or other.
“Yes, they’re drill marks,” Joe Steiner insisted. “And you don’t need to get a second opinion. While you were gone, I had Boston look at them. We got both stereoscopic and an electron microscopic analysis. No marine organism in the books made those holes. They also ruled out lasers, knives, ice picks, and every known kind of muzzle projectile—bullet, pellet, BB, buckshot, dart—you name it. They were drilled, Greg, and you can take that to the bank.”
Greg was on the phone the morning after he had returned from Chattanooga. He would have called from the road yesterday, but Joe was out of the office yesterday, car-shopping with his daughter.
“How come the parents weren’t notified about the holes?”
“Because somebody messed up, maybe at the Gloucester end, maybe Tennessee,” Joe said. “It’s possible it was simply overlooked, or somebody didn’t think it was significant. Whatever, the Boston ME made it clear those perforations were the results of a neurological procedure. And that got into the report because I saw it.”
“They didn’t have a clue what I was talking about.”
“If the kid had had an operation, the parents would have remembered. Nobody saw it as a cause of death. These things happen.”
“Joe, you weren’t down there,” Greg said. “You didn’t see the expression on their faces when I told them that their kid’s head had been drilled.”
“I understand. That must have been a bitch. But when you calm down, you might want to give this woman a call.”
“What woman?”
“Write this down: Cynthia Porter, R.N., at the Essex Medical Center.”
“What’s she got?”
“A kid with cluster-scars on his head identical to those of the Sagamore Boy and the Dixon kid,” Joe said.
“What?”
“And he’s alive.”
14
Nicole was naked but for a tutu and doing peek-a-boo pirouettes while her boyfriend, the older guy from the diner, lay naked and panting on her bed in a state of red alert, his wanger armed and poised like a surface-to-air missile—when suddenly she glided to the window and dropped the blinds, cutting off Brendan’s view.
Brendan lowered the binoculars. Whatever they were doing in there, only the fish in her aquarium could appreciate.
It was a little after midnight that same evening. For nearly half an hour he had watched her through her bathroom window just thirty feet from his perch, taking in every moment of her precoital ritual. She had stripped down to that pink-cream flesh then, with her back to him, she brushed her golden mane, after which, turning slightly toward him, she shaved herself at the sink, her arms raised like swan necks toward the ceiling so he got a full double-barrel shot of those pink-capped breasts, then raising her legs as if practicing a ballet move, running the razor in long strokes, turning this way and that, all the while oblivious to the raised blinds and Brendan in the tree right outside her window.
Even so close, he could not see his mark because she never faced him straight-on long enough—just a quick flash of the dark target area, then she slipped into the shower, which was one of those fancy all-glass-and-chrome enclosures that instantly misted up, rendering her a moving impressionism in pink. And when she was finished, he lost her to a towel.
Brendan slipped the field glasses into its case and slumped against the tree trunk. This was the third time he had staked her out. And another bust. Next time.
He didn’t care about the boyfriend, who had climbed up the drainpipe onto the porch roof and into her bedroom. Brendan was only interested in Nicole.
Nicole DaFoe.
He liked to stretch the syllables like sugar nougat.
Ni-cole Da-Foe
DaFee DaFi DaFoe DaFum
I smell the blood of a Yummy Yum Yum
Nicole DaFoe.
Everybody knew her name because it was in the newspapers all the time about how she made the honor roll at Bloomfield—a precious little prep school for rich geeks—how she got this award and that, how she was at the top of her class two years in a row and won first place in the New England science fair, how she was nominated for a Mensa scholarship for her senior year and was going to some fancy genius camp this summer to study biology and astrophysics. But not how she danced naked for her boyfriends. And not what they all said: Nicole DaFoe: the Ice Queen who fucked.
Next time, he told himself. And up close and personal.
At this hour most of Hawthorne was asleep. Brendan had slipped out in his grandfather’s truck and driven the fifteen miles to Nicole’s house. From his perch high in an old European beech elm, he watched a blue-white crystalline moon rise above the line of trees and the fancy homes that made up her street. It blazed so brightly that the trees made shadow claws across the lawns.
But Brendan did not notice. He was now lost in the moon face—so much so that his body had gone rigid with concentration and his mind sat at the edge of a hypnotic trance. So lost that neither the electric chittering of insects nor the pass of an occasional car registered. So lost that the ancient shadows on the white surface appeared to move.
He had nearly cleared his mind of the assaulting clutter—of verbal and visual noise that gushed out of his memory in phantasmagoric spurts—crazy flash images of meaningless things that would at times rise up in his mind like fuzzy stills, as if he were watching a slide show through gauze—other times they’d come in snippets of animated scenes, like a film of incoherent memory snatches spliced together by some lunatic editor—images of people’s eyes, their faces blurred out—just eyes—and lights and shiny metal, television commercials, green beeping oscilloscope patterns.