Brendan looked up at her to see if she was joking.
“Just checking.”
He told her.
“How about the last one?”
“George W. Bush.”
“Keep going.”
“William Jefferson Clinton.”
Then on a hunch she asked, “Do you know any more?”
For a strange moment he locked eyes with her. Then he said simply, “All of them.”
“Beg pardon?”
“George Bush, Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon …” He stopped for a moment, his eyes taking on an odd cast. “Nixon, Nixon, Nixon …”
“That’s pretty good,” Cindy said to snap him back. Then he looked at her and shook his head as if trying to dispel something. And without a moment’s hesitation he began to recite: “Lyndon Johnson, John Kennedy, Dwight Eisenhower, Harry Truman …” And he named presidents all the way back to George Washington.
Cindy did not know all the names or proper order, but she had a strong suspicion that this wondrous teenage kid had them exactly right. “Holy cow!” she said in pure awe. “That’s amazing.”
He shrugged. “It d-d-didn’t work out.”
He looked at her with deep penetrating eyes that locked onto her own. He stared at her with such intensity that she had to look away.
“Can I go?” he asked.
“Pretty soon. The doc has to check your films first.”
A few minutes later, the resident physician, Dr. Adrian Budd, came by to say that he had read the scan and found no signs of a concussion. When he left, Cindy handed Brendan a couple sheets on head injuries. “If there’s any sign of swelling, pain, headaches, or dizziness, you give us a call. The number’s on the top of the page.”
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:
Joe Steiner was head pathologist at the medical examiner’s office in Pocasset.
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
