that she was dead, while at the same time a tiny part of his brain clung to a candle flicker of hope that it was another woman they had pulled out of the wreckage.
It had been a clear, cool starry April night—the kind that made you aware of infinity, and just how incidental human life is. He had been at home half-watching a ball game and trying to stay awake until Lindsay returned. She was late because one of the girls at Genevieve Bratton had tried to kill herself, and Lindsay was most of the crisis- management team. Over the years, she had seen girls whose young lives were full of horrors so awful that she had stopped talking about them. And many of those lives she had helped turn around. Her colleagues spoke glowingly of her compassion and skills in working with troubled kids. At a fund-raising gala three years ago, she was commended for her work. A graduate who had come into the school at age fourteen—a suicidal victim of repeated sexual abuse, an alcoholic, and a drug addict with a rap sheet a yard long—personally thanked Lindsay for setting her on a path of recovery that had led to a college degree, a successful career, and a sense of self-esteem. Greg had tears of pride in his eyes as the. audience gave Lindsay a standing ovation.
Greg moved down the corridor toward Joe Steiner’s office, and he could still feel the horrid disbelief that clutched him as he walked into Room 55 two years ago to identify her body—how Joe had met him in the hall surrounded by troopers and other officers, including T.J. Gelford. How their faces appeared like a funeral frieze.
Today Joe Steiner was on his phone at his desk, the sports section of
Reluctantly Greg’s job brought him here a few times a year, and the place always looked the same. On the floor sat a stack of large white plastic formaldehyde containers labeled in Magic Marker—
“Tonight’s my last good night of sleep,” Joe said when he got off the phone. “My daughter Sarah gets her driver’s license tomorrow.”
Joe was only half-joking. He had been a medical examiner for nearly twenty years, conducting more than a hundred autopsies annually. In his time, he had been host to every conceivable form of human death: by fire and water; in car, boat, and plane accidents; by their own hand and somebody else’s. As he once said, he had seen it all. To him, the deceased’s remains were no longer a human being but a scientific specimen containing information on it or in it—information that would assist the judicial system, public health office, police departments, and surviving families. But what still affected Joe—what still cut through that professional crust—was finding on his table a teenager who had wrapped himself or herself around a tree. “Such a waste,” he once said with tears in his eyes.
“I wish they’d up the age to thirty-five.”
“Or give them bumper cars for the first ten years,” Greg said.
Joe smiled. He had sad blue eyes that reminded you of the unspeakable images they had absorbed in his two decades. “So, how you doing?”
Greg knew what he meant: Had he ridden down the grief? Had he gotten on with his life since Lindsay’s death? Had he started dating other women?
During the first year after his wife’s death, Greg’s grief was ravenous, all-consuming. Early on, he wasn’t certain he could survive—and several nights he had found himself gnawing on the barrel of his gun. He had lost the love of his life and his baby-to-be, and with them all purpose. Yet, knowing that Lindsay would want him to go on, he threw himself into his work, taking on extra cases, doing overtime. Still, there were days when he could barely function for missing her. It was like trying to breathe on one lung.
The thought of seeing other women during that first year was borderline heresy. In his mind, his marriage to Lindsay had been a rare alliance with a woman whom he respected as much as he had loved. It always amazed him that someone so extraordinary as she had settled for someone so unextraordinary as he. He felt truly privileged. So, in the second year when friends tried to fix him up, he knew he could not settle for just any woman. She had to be special. He dated casually a couple times and met some fine people. He even on occasion met a woman he had fantasized over. But he soon lost interest and gave up. Lindsay had spoiled other women for him.
Today, the pain of her loss was no less keen. It still throbbed at the core of him. He had just gotten harder around it. And instead of other women, he took up the Sagamore Boy case. It gave him uncompromising purpose.
“So, what do we have?”
“His name is Grady Vernon Dixon, age six, white male from Coldwater, Tennessee. He’s been missing for fourteen months.” From a file folder, Joe produced several color blowups of a human skull and a single long bone. As he had explained on the phone, the remains had been processed at the main office in Boston and the State Crime Lab in Sudbury. After twelve weeks, Gloucester and state police had exhausted all leads, as had investigators at the Tennessee end. All they had were the boy’s abduction and an unattended death—no suspects, no evidence, no leads. Just two devastated parents. And a skull and leg bone.
Greg moved his chair forward and examined the photos.
“You can thank Patty Carney for the link,” Joe said. “She’s the forensic anthropologist at the Boston lab where they processed your Sagamore Boy. She made the connection just the other day and called me.”
“Any idea how long it was in the water?”
“Hard to tell, but from the wear and tear from bouncing around the bottom, I’d say at least a year.”
“So, it’s possible he drowned.”
“It’s possible.”
The skull, like the leg bone, was grayish-brown, not bleached from the sun. Only a few of the teeth were missing, unlike the Sagamore Boy whose skull contained only the incisors and two half-grown back teeth.
“I think he was pretty deep, because there isn’t the weight loss you’d get in warm water.”
“How did they determine it’s a male?”
“There was no soft tissue, but the leg bone had traces of marrow inside,” Joe explained. “And with that, they could detect certain DNA markers which only occur on the Y chromosome—the male chromosome. The calibrations of the skull also point to a male. The same with his ethnicity. Different races have different skull-feature measurements. His age we determine by bone growth and plate fissures, but there’s a larger window of error there—between five and seven years.”
Steiner handed Greg some color photos of the remains lying on the boat deck among piles of scallops, fish, crabs, and seaweed. They looked so sadly out of place. “They were taken by the boat captain.”
Greg turned to one of the several profile shots of the Dixon skull. “It’s got the same holes.”
“That’s what I called you for.”
There were two clusters each of ten small holes on the left side of the Dixon skull——one group between the eye socket and ear hole; the other above the left ear.
Joe opened his desk drawer and pulled out a folder with photos of the Sagamore Boy’s skull. “When this came in three years ago, my guess was the holes were some marine-animal artifacts.” From the same drawer he removed three large white quahog shells. “Also from Sagamore Beach,” he said. He laid the shells under the desk light. Each of the shells had small-bore holes of roughly the same diameter. “These were made from calcium-loving worms called polychaetes. They bore holes that are almost perfectly round, about one to two millimeters in diameter.”
“They look like the skull holes.”
“And that’s what threw me,” Joe said. “Same size, but they’re not from polychaetes or any other aquatic organism I know of. These skull holes occurred premortem.”
“How do you know that?”
“First, the animal holes are random and only partially clustered—maybe a dozen holes in an area then random spacing over a broader surface. Sometimes, as in this shell, you only get two or three on the whole surface, and some don’t go all the way through. But the Sagamore skull and the Dixon boy each have a cluster of ten and
