Just then, Freddie Wyman returned with an older man in baggy pants and an ill-fitting shirt. The fireman introduced him as Richard Berryman, Brendan’s grandfather.
“He’s going to be fine,” Cindy told him.
“Hard heads run in the family,” Mr. Berryman said and winked at her. Then he turned to Brendan. “How you doing, Brendy?”
Brendan glanced at the old man. “Okay.” Then he moved to a sink where he studied his scalp in the wall mirror.
“Maybe it’ll knock some sense in him,” Mr. Berryman said to Cindy. “He quit school to work as a waiter, would you believe.”
“That’ll get old fast,” Cindy said, seeing the disappointment in the man’s face. “He’s seems like a smart kid. While we were cleaning him up, he was reciting Shakespeare.”
The old man humpfed. “What he needs is a girlfriend, not Shakespeare.”
“That’ll happen soon enough,” Cindy said.
“Watch out for glass doors,” Cindy said to Brendan. As she handed his grandfather some ointment and a box of gauze pads for the cut, the air was filled with shouting.
The next instant, the double doors burst open with paramedics pushing in a teenage girl on a gurney, trailed by several others including what looked like her parents crying. The girl’s body was covered with blood, and the paramedics were holding a mask on her face and an IV drip to her arm.
Cindy had heard the radio report when she had left for Radiology. Instantly, the ER team was in action. Interns and nurses swarmed around the girl, directing the paramedics where to take her. One tech shook his head at Cindy. The girl was critical. She needed immediate intubation, but somebody shouted that the operating rooms were occupied, they’d have to go to number four where Brendan had been.
While Cindy moved out of the way, she heard Richard say, “Isn’t that Trisha Costello?”
Brendan, who was still at the mirror, glanced at the battered girl on the gurney. “Yes,” he said, momentarily fascinated. Then returned to the mirror and his scalp.
Someplace amid the commotion, an intern shouted for the defibrillator. The girl had gone into cardiac arrest. Nurses were running and shouting as the girl was hooked up. Cindy was not part of the team because she had been working on Brendan when the dispatch came in. But from across the room she could see the electric pads come crashing down on the girl, and the body jolt in place. But a few moments later, another nurse said, “Again … No pulse, no pressure. Nothing … Again … Hang on, Trisha. HANG ON!”
It wasn’t long before Cindy could read the signs from the team around her that the girl was dead.
A wail of horror went up from the mother who was at the bedside with the interns, nurses, and technicians.
Like several of the other nonstaffers, Richard was stunned in place. “I think she died,” he said to Brendan.
Brendan looked over at the clutch of people through the open curtain. “Mmm,” he said. Then he turned to Richard and parted his hair. “Where did I get these?”
“For cryin’ out loud, a girl you know just died and you’re asking about some goddamn scratches on your head.” Richard’s voice was trembling.
Across from them, doctors were trying to comfort the parents who sobbed in grief.
Richard pulled Brendan from the mirror. “I can’t take this,” he said, and they left the emergency room, with Brendan still puzzled and feeling his scalp.
4
SAGAMORE POLICE DEPARTMENT
SAGAMORE, MASSACHUSETTS
The fax report sitting on Detective Greg Zakarian’s desk that morning was to the point:
Greg,Human remains pulled up in scallop net 12 miles off Gloucester 2 months ago. Has similar specs & markings to your case #01–057–4072. Positive ID. I think you might want to take a look.Joe Steiner
Joe Steiner was head pathologist at the medical examiner’s office in Pocasset.
Same specs and markings. Positive ID.
It was the first break in three years. Three long, frustrating years.
Greg sipped his coffee and looked at the two pictures pinned to the corkboard next to his desk: a photo of his wife Lindsay; and a pastel portrait of a young boy.
People no longer asked about Lindsay, because two years ago she was killed in a head-on collision on the Sagamore Bridge by some drunk who swerved into her lane. It had happened a little after midnight. She was returning from a too-long day at the Genevieve Bratton School, a residential treatment center for troubled girls in Plymouth where, for eight years, she had been a social worker. The drunk was returning from a stag party in Barnstable. She died instantly. He walked away with a broken collarbone. Lindsay had been the fundamental condition of Greg’s life, and in a telephone call, she was gone.
But people still asked about the boy in the other picture. Those who didn’t know wondered if he was Greg’s son. He’d say no, which was the literal truth. But to his colleagues in the department—from the dispatchers at the entrance to T.J. Gelford, his supervisor, to Norm Adler, the chief—the boy was his. Greg’s Boy. The Sagamore Boy. His own Boy in the Box.
For the last three years, Greg had tried to determine the child’s identity—ever since his skull was dug up in a sandbar on a local beach. As the responding officer, Greg had worked with CPAC, the state police, DA’s office, the medical examiner, the FBI, and missing children organizations. What they knew from forensic calibrations was that the skull belonged to a six- or seven-year-old white male. But they didn’t know who he was, where he came from, or how he had died. From the condition of the skull, it appeared to have been in the ocean for at least three years, and was probably washed up on the Sagamore Beach by storms. From where, nobody knew.
Two years ago, the state police abandoned the investigation since they had no leads, no tips, no cause of death, no evidence of a crime, no dental matches with anybody in the Missing Children Network’s files, no identity. Today, it was officially a cold case.
But Greg had kept the file open, regularly checking the databases of the Missing Children Network as well as the daily NCIC and CJIS broadcasts of missing persons from law enforcement agencies all over the country. His file was fat with old broadcasts. Because the Sagamore PD had no cold-case unit or funds, Greg did this on his own, in his spare time or at home, often pursuing out-of-town leads out of his own pocket because the department budget could no longer cover him. He had even hired a forensic anthropologist from Northeastern University to do an artistic reconstruction from the skull resulting in the drawing on his wall.
Greg knew that his colleagues saw the case as a private obsession. And that was true, since, from day one, Greg had had a gut feeling that there was something odd about this case: that it wasn’t just some hapless child who had fallen off a raft and gotten swept out to sea. Call it cop instinct, or intuition, or ESP, but Greg sensed something darkly disturbing. And, in spite of the years that had passed, he maintained his solitary investigation against the diminishing odds of resolution. He kept it up in part to take his mind off Lindsay’s death and to rescue himself from bitterness and self-absorption. A shrink would probably say that his obsession was rooted in a quest for his lost family—a need to find closure. Maybe so.
Lindsay was seven months pregnant when she was killed. The little boy she was carrying died with her.