Phillip nodded. “She wants her daddy. When he shows, she’ll eat.”
She had been picked up last week at a swimming hole in upstate New York. Phillip and Oliver had done well. They had snatched her from a beach using as decoy one of the other children from the camp, effectively fooling the mother long enough to make the switch.
Were she to grow to maturity, Lilly would be brilliant. But she was dirtpoor. And in spite of good Samaritans and all those financial-aid programs, chances were that dear sweet Lilly would end up filled with drugs and booze and living on welfare, festering at the bottom of the social compost heap, raising trailer-park brutes. What good was genius when tethered to the bed, the bassinet, and the kitchen stove?
Besides, she was also worth a million dollars.
Malenko took the clipboard. Lilly Bellingham. Age seven. From Henley, New York. Forty-eight inches tall. Forty-three pounds. And she had an IQ of 168.
And tomorrow, little Amber Bernardi.
Malenko bid a silent
Travis Valentine. He was asleep on his bed, a book on butterflies lay open beside him. The TV monitor flickered mindlessly.
According to the tests and functional scans, he had very high language proficiency—ninety—ninth percentile, in fact. Left-brain incandescence. He would probably grow up to be a first-rate writer or lawyer.
And if the parents decided not to keep him a dim bulb, so might young Dylan Whitman.
43
Because he was now on night shift, Greg didn’t get to bed until around seven A.M. So he was in a deep sleep when the phone rang at nine-thirty that Wednesday morning.
A female identifying herself as Patty Carney from the medical examiner’s office in Boston said she had read his bulletin from last Thursday. Greg was still too furry with sleep to register the name. The forensic pathologist.
“We had a homicide victim two days ago. You probably read about it. A kid from Hawthorne, killed by his mother who then killed herself?”
“Yeah, sure.” The story was all over the media.
“Well, we did an autopsy on the kid, and when we removed his brain we found that he had the same skull perforation clusters as in your bulletin. Thirteen along the left side of his head from the frontal cortex above the eyebrow to over the ear. But there’s a difference from the others. He had eight other holes on the right side of his head, too. And they were clearly done in a medical neurological procedure, probably when he was very young, from the healing signs. But I can’t tell you what for.”
“What’s his name?”
“Julian Watts. The obit’s in today’s paper. The funeral’s tomorrow.” She gave him some of the details. “I sent you a scan of the photo taken from the inside of his skullcap. I don’t know what they’re from, but I thought you’d be interested.”
Greg was suddenly very awake, and his heart was pounding. He thanked the woman, saying that he would get right to his computer for the scan.
“Oh, yeah. One more thing,” Patty said before hanging up. “His brain was over one point six kilograms.”
“Is that significant?”
“Well, the normal fourteen-year-old male’s brain weighs one point four kilos. His brain was nearly half a pound heavier.”
“How do you explain that?”
“I can’t.”
44
Brendan sat by himself at the rear of the Hawthorne Unitarian Church trying not to lose his mind.
He recognized several people from the Dells and the surrounding towns, getting lost in naming each of them and their family members, addresses, the kinds of cars they drove, golfing handicaps, and other biographical junk. That was the danger of large crowds, and the reasons why he hated function nights at the club. To stem the data tide, he tried boxing himself into a single distraction, such as the organ music—except he found himself visualizing the score until the inside of his skull was a running video of endless musical staves and prancing notes. If he took any more medication, he’d go to sleep. What he needed was something in the moment to focus on and cut out all the noise.
He couldn’t flip through the hymnal because he’d only get stuck in lyrics which would play in his head the rest of the day. He tried to think of Vanessa and Julian Watts lying in their coffins, but he began to imagine their state of necropsy, how their bodies had been drained of blood—what was left of it after the police had found them—and replaced with embalming fluids, and how in a few days they would begin to turn dark, and shrivel, and the fluids would begin to leak from their orifices.
He then ran through the capitals of the world, as stupefyingly boring as that was, then moved to the most populous cities including their populations according to the latest
What snapped him back was Nicole.
She had entered the rear of the church with her parents. Before they could move to a pew, he put his backpack on his seat and got up. “I have to see you,” he said, pulling her aside.
She gave him her blue-ice look. “Leave me alone.”
“Look, it’s v-v-very important.”
She started after her parents without response.
“Please.”
When her mother looked back, Nicole flashed her face to him. “Later,” she said through her teeth. Then she moved down the aisle.
Brendan returned to his pew and watched her move to the front of the church to join her parents. She was dressed in a simple dark blue sundress with white trim and dark blue pumps—an ensemble that projected a nautical motif, as if she were some kind of naval recruit. As he watched her settle, his mind slipped to that tattoo she wore.
While he worked on that for the hundredth time, he spotted Rachel Whitman walking in with her husband. Nicole had said that they had been on a parent tour of Bloomfield, which didn’t make sense.
A few minutes later Sheila MacPhearson came down the aisle with her daughter, Lucinda, who was carrying a Palm Pilot. They took seats beside the Whitmans. The women were friends—Rachel Whitman of 224 Morningside Drive and Sheila MacPhearson of 22 Willow Lane.
Mrs. MacPhearson’s husband, Harry, had lost all his money in a dot-com venture, then died of heart failure a year ago. According to rumors circulating at the club, he had left his wife with considerable debt, which might explain why she was always hustling off to show a property.
Lucinda fascinated him. She was clever, cunning, and very authoritarian with other children. He once caught her sticking a pin into the head of the rabbit in play school. She also knew how to turn on the charm, winning over Miss Jean and other Dellsies. Her mother, she wore like an engagement ring.
