He and the other paramedics rushed to give the two fallen divers the full assault of epinephrine, atropine, sodium bicarbonate, IV fluids, a breathing tube, and chest compressions. But they couldn’t hide their disappointment. As Hoss was climbing off the trailer, one of the paramedics complained that the divers should have never covered the bodies. They didn’t have the authority to pronounce people dead.
Hoss heard the paramedic’s complaint as an accusation, and it enraged him. He had just come within a hairsbreadth of dying, and these were the first words he had to hear? He looked down at his stopwatch, which he had started back when they’d put on their first emergency air devices—the Ocencos—which had itself been at least a half hour after Tim and Billy had been struck down. The stopwatch now read240: 1 hour, 40 minutes. If those paramedics only knew the near-lethal lengths that he, Riggs, and DJ had gone to in the hopes of trying to save their friends. By now, Tim and Billy had surely been dead for at least two hours. They were simply beyond being saved. Hoss was utterly drained, but he knew this much: he shouldn’t have to defend himself to anyone. Go fuck yourself, Hoss muttered, before Riggs grabbed him by the sleeve and pulled him away.
The paramedics moved Tim and Billy from longboards to stretchers and got to work, with Wilson and his partner focused on Tim and the other pair on Billy. Despite their intensity, none of the resuscitation efforts produced any sparks of hope. They now wheeled the two stretchers along the ramp to the bottom of the shaft, then into the bigger man cage. They continued their chest compressions as they began their slow climb up the shaft, the cage swaying slightly as it made its ascent.
When the sunlight met them at the top of the shaft at 3:53 p.m., and the paramedics began wheeling the stretchers off the cage, a strange thing happened. The thick crowd of workers, managers, and emergency personnel who were arrayed around the shaft began to applaud. Maybe they were applauding the effort. Or maybe they thought Billy and Tim were still alive, even if the survivors—and by now the paramedics—had already bowed to reality.
Like Hoss and Riggs, DJ felt shattered. All three of them had just cheated death, but there was nothing to celebrate because two of their brothers hadn’t made it. The paramedics could work over the bodies all they wanted, but they couldn’t reverse the cruel fate that DJ had been forced to confront when he’d held Billy’s lifeless body in his arms nine miles into that tunnel. He watched as Billy and Tim were taken up the shaft in stretchers. They were headed for the hospital, but DJ already knew they were going to end up in the morgue.
DJ stepped into the man cage, but just before the gate shut, he remembered something and hopped out, bounding back toward the Humvee. It was his hard hat. When he finally made it to topside, he was surrounded by people who all wanted to know the same thing: What happened? He was in no mood to talk. Despite the divers’ pact to stay together, once they were out of the tunnel, forces quickly conspired to pull them apart. Tim and Billy had been loaded into separate helicopters, to be transported to separate hospitals. The paramedics who’d been in the tunnel had left with the bodies. But the swarm of emergency vehicles on Deer Island included several other ambulances, and different medics swooped in to work over DJ, Hoss, and Riggs separately. Before he’d even noticed it, one of them grabbed DJ’s arm and hooked him up to an IV.
Nearby Harald stood looking shell-shocked. Dave Corkum, the tunnel manager who was enrolled in law school, approached him and said, “Harald, you’d better get yourself a lawyer.”
Someone standing next to DJ told him he was lucky to have made it out alive. The comment punctured the surreal haze that DJ had felt hovering over him ever since he’d come upon Billy’s body. He turned over his hard hat and caressed his grandfather’s Virgin Mary medal that was hanging on a piece of twine inside. “This,” he said, “is what got us out.” Then he cut the twine and put the medal in his pocket.
12. “Why, God?”
“Potential fatality at Deer Island.”
Mary McCauley hung up241 the phone and looked at her watch. It read three-twenty. McCauley was a Massachusetts state trooper assigned to the Suffolk County district attorney’s office, focusing on death investigations. The plainclothes detective did not fit the typical trooper profile. An athletic thirty-four-year-old with shoulder-length dirty-blond hair, McCauley had gone to law school and served for several years as an assistant district attorney before enrolling in the police academy. A big reason for her career switch was that as a prosecutor, she had often felt frustration in trying to understand a case simply by reading the police report and reviewing photos. That approach never satisfied her type-A personality. She regularly spent lots of time reinterviewing witnesses and visiting crime scenes, so she could be more persuasive when she had to stand before a jury. After three years of doing this, working sixty-hour weeks as a prosecutor for pay so low that she had to continue waitressing on the side, McCauley decided that if she became a cop, it might be simpler for everyone involved.
This afternoon’s call about the Deer Island incident, which had been routed from a different state police office, contained few details. She most likely wouldn’t investigate the case unless someone actually died, but even if that happened, her involvement wasn’t a sure thing. Massachusetts was so provincial that there were blurry jurisdictional lines and frequent turf battles among its various law enforcement agencies. On more than one bridge-jumper investigation, McCauley had been able to take the lead only after establishing that the suicide victim had jumped from a state-owned bridge and had landed in a spit of water that fell under state jurisdiction. At 3:53 p.m., her supervisor gave her clearance to head to the scene.
McCauley had been born and bred in Boston, as evidenced by her toughness and accent, which rendered a word like arson as AH-sun. Yet the areas around the north of the city remained somewhat foreign lands for her. Coming from a tight Irish family, she had grown up in Mattapan, a gritty neighborhood on the city’s southern edge. Although she had married a guy from the North Shore and was now raising a family there with him, McCauley was still finding her way around this band of boreal boroughs ringing Logan Airport. The only thing she knew about Deer Island was there was some kind of sewer plant there, and she had once gone for a run along the coastal route leading to it.
When she and her partner, John O’Leary, arrived on the scene at quarter past four, they found lots of commotion242. She saw fire engines, ladder trucks, and ambulances from multiple departments, marine rescue units, and mobile command units. So many emergency vehicles were clogging tiny Deer Island that she had to park her unmarked cruiser near the entrance and hoof it all the way to where the bustle was, around the entrance to the shaft. As she approached, the last of the ambulances was clearing out. She tracked down a deputy fire chief who seemed to have a handle on the chaos, and he quickly filled her in. He pointed to the ocean and told her that three divers had been working as part of a “dry penetration” job at the end of the nine-and-a-half-mile-long empty sewer tunnel. Around 1:45 p.m., when the divers had returned to their pair of Humvees, they’d found the other two members of their team lying unconscious. Around four o’clock, the unconscious divers had been airlifted, one to Boston Medical Center and the other to Massachusetts General Hospital, where the three surviving divers had just been taken by ambulance.
As McCauley tried to digest the jumble of information, the deputy chief pointed out a few of the major players on the scene—managers from the various entities involved in the job. Then he added another crucial detail. Deep into that endless tunnel, there was no light or oxygen to speak of.
241 (Chapter 12, note 1)
Mary McCauley hung up: Trooper Mary McCauley, “Sudden Death/Deer Island, Winthrop/07/21/99,” Massachusetts State Police Suffolk County Detective Unit, January 14, 2000,