The detective found herself overwhelmed. As an investigator, she prided herself on her ability to remain calm no matter what she found at a crime scene. One Thanksgiving she’d responded to a call at a house where a body had apparently been left rotting inside for weeks. She could smell the stench a block away. She had arrived to find a bunch of firefighters bent over outside, most of them retching, but she had remained standing. Here on Deer Island, the details the fire chief was sharing weren’t grisly. But they were so confusing, they made her head hurt. Divers traveling in a pair of opposite-facing Humvees along a tunnel that stretched under the ocean for more than nine miles? A tunnel that had no air and no light in it? Was he serious? Even the terminology—dry penetration—seemed like a foreign language. McCauley nodded along, hurriedly jotting down notes onto her white steno pad. But to her, it all sounded like the setup for some half-baked science fiction novel.
As she talked to others on the scene, her confusion continued to mount. The MWRA owned the tunnel, but there was a contractor building it for the water and sewer agency, which also had a separate company called a construction manager that was supervising the job. The two unconscious divers worked for two separate diving companies, one from Spokane, Washington, and the other from Portsmouth, New Hampshire. People from OSHA were present now, and because that federal agency often investigated workplace accidents, there was some thought that the OSHA people would run this investigation. As bewildered as McCauley was, though, she knew that if she was going to be involved in this case, she wanted to make sure it was done the right way. So she wasn’t about to let herself get boxed out. Within fifteen minutes of her arrival, at least one aspect of the investigation became clearer. Word came in from both Mass General and Boston Medical243: Billy Juse and Tim Nordeen had been pronounced dead. They were now actual, rather than potential, fatalities. McCauley called her boss, and he gave her the confirmation she needed. This was now officially a state-police-led investigation, and she would take the lead.
She knew that in these critical early hours, she had to focus on controlling what she could. That boiled down to preserving all the evidence and documenting everything she and her partner heard and saw. As she did this, more and more questions began throbbing in her head. The first was the most fundamentaclass="underline" How had these two men died? Was the cause a freak accident? Could it have been suicide? Negligence? Homicide? If it was a crime, who was responsible?
McCauley had probed enough stabbings and murders to know that finding answers to the big, befuddling questions required keeping your eye on the smaller, more elementary tasks—like protecting the crime scene from any tampering. But in this situation, even that basic point morphed into a big, baffling question: Where was the crime scene? She knew it wasn’t where she was standing on Deer Island or even down at the base of that shaft 420 feet into the earth. The crime scene was where these two men had fallen unconscious and presumably died, and that was nine miles into an unlit, unventilated tunnel. That prompted only more questions: What evidence did she need to collect? How could she collect it? And how would she ensure that it was securely stored to preserve what cops call the “chain of custody”? It wasn’t as if she could toss a couple of Humvees into the trunk of her cruiser and bring them back to an evidence locker at her office.
From her early days as a prosecutor, McCauley knew that to do an investigation right, you had to be able to see and touch the crime scene. Even before the full outline of the probe came into view for her, she decided that’s what she needed to do. She was no fan of heights, either going up the elevator of a skyscraper or descending down a skyscraper-length shaft, but she felt she had no choice. If the crime scene was nine miles into a tunnel buried below the floor of the ocean, she would have to find a way to get there. But was that even going to be an option? Would some state trooper with no background in engineering or diving be allowed to go into that tunnel? For that matter, would anyone be allowed in, given what had happened? Something in the tunnel had left two men dead and very nearly killed three others. Could there be some kind of mystery gas down there, hungry for more victims?
After a round of brief interviews and some basic evidence collection, McCauley realized she needed to get to the people who really knew what had happened, and they were now being treated at the hospital. Good police work requires talking to eyewitnesses as soon as possible after an incident, when their memories are fresh and before other forces can cloud their heads or shut them up. She closed up her notebook and headed to Mass General.
It was the between-meals, late-afternoon stretch at the Poor People’s Pub, and the often-bustling New Hampshire establishment was empty save for the half-dozen regulars who sat at the bar, drinking their way through another afternoon. As manager, Michelle took advantage of the lull by heading into the back room to do some restocking.
Before she could make a dent, one of the waitresses found her back there. “Michelle,” she said, “you have a phone call.”
The waitress knew Michelle had been on edge all week, preoccupied by the job Billy was doing in Boston. The pub staff loved Billy as much as they loved Michelle, so when she saw a look of concern play over her boss’s face, the waitress quickly sought to reassure her. “It’s Tap,” she said. “Everything’s okay.”
“Tap?” Michelle replied, startled.
“Yes.”
“No,” Michelle said, “it’s not okay.”
“What do you mean?” the waitress asked.
“Tap doesn’t call me at work. It’s not okay.”
With her stomach completely knotted, Michelle raced to the phone. Tap told her there’d been an accident in the tunnel and Billy had been involved. He stressed that they didn’t know much yet. “You need to get to Mass General Hospital.”
Shaken, Michelle went to hang up the receiver but pulled it back at the last second. “Tap,” she said. “Is he okay?”
There was a pause, and then he answered. “No.”
Michelle knew she had to rush to Boston, but she also knew she was in no condition to drive. She surveyed the bar. The regulars who cradled their drinks without budging from their stools had maintained enough of their faculties to detect that something was very wrong with the woman staring at them, but still were in no shape to drive her where she needed to go. Michelle called the pub owner and left her as calm a message as she could muster. “Billy’s been in an accident. I don’t think it’s good,” she said. “I’ll probably be out of work for a while.”
Moments later the owner called back: “I’ll drive you.”
As she waited for her ride, Michelle decided she needed to break the news to Billy’s New Hampshire family, Deb and Ken.
DJ’s mother, Lorraine, was working as a home health aide, keeping an elderly woman company in the lady’s house in Brookline, an affluent community on Boston’s southwestern border. They had spent much of the afternoon watching the endless television news coverage of the effort to recover John F. Kennedy, Jr.’s body. The rest of the nation always assumed that the Kennedys could do no wrong in the eyes of every Massachusetts voter, but in fact there was a small but vocal portion of the local population who, because of one transgression or another, had absolutely no use for any member of the political royal family. That subset included this elderly woman in Brookline.
243 (Chapter 12, note 3)
Word came in from both Mass General and Boston Medicaclass="underline" Ibid., 5.