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Authors: Gary Braver

BOOK: GRAY MATTER
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SAGAMORE POLICE DEPARTMENT
SAGAMORE, MASSACHUSETTS
T
he fax report sitting on Detective Greg Zakarian’s desk that morning was to the point:
Greg,
Human remains pulled up in scallop net 12 miles off Gloucester 2 months ago. Has similar specs
&
markings to your case #01–057–4072. Positive ID. I think you might want to take a look
.
Joe Steiner
Joe Steiner was head pathologist at the medical examiner’s office in Pocasset.
Same specs and markings. Positive
ID.
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 condition of Greg’s life, and in a telephone call, she was gone.
But people still asked about the boy in the other picture. Those who didn’t know wondered if he was Greg’s son. He’d say no, which was the literal truth. But to his colleagues in the department—from the dispatchers at the entrance to T.J. Gelford, his supervisor, to Norm Adler, the chief—the boy was his. Greg’s Boy. The Sagamore Boy. His own Boy in the Box.
For the last three years, Greg had tried to determine the child’s identity—ever since his skull was dug up in a sandbar on a local beach. As the responding officer, Greg had worked with CPAC, the state police, DA’s office, the medical examiner, the FBI, and missing children organizations. What they knew from forensic calibrations was that the skull belonged to a six- or seven-year-old white male. But they didn’t know who he was, where he came from, or how he had died. From the condition of the skull, it appeared to have been in the ocean for at least three years, and was probably washed up on the Sagamore Beach by storms. From where, nobody knew.
Two years ago, the state police abandoned the investigation since they had no leads, no tips, no cause of death, no evidence of a crime, no dental matches with anybody in the Missing Children Network’s files, no identity. Today, it was officially a cold case.
But Greg had kept the file open, regularly checking the databases of the Missing Children Network as well as the daily NCIC and CJIS broadcasts of missing persons from law enforcement agencies all over the country. His file was fat with old broadcasts. Because the Sagamore PD had no cold-case unit or funds, Greg did this on his own, in his spare time or at home, often pursuing out-of-town leads out of his own pocket because the department budget could no longer cover him. He had even hired a forensic anthropologist from Northeastern University to do an artistic reconstruction from the skull resulting in the drawing on his wall.
Greg knew that his colleagues saw the case as a private obsession. And that was true, since, from day one, Greg had had a gut feeling that there was something odd about this case: that it wasn’t just some hapless child who had fallen off a raft and gotten swept out to sea. Call it cop instinct, or intuition, or ESP, but Greg sensed something darkly disturbing. And, in spite of the years that had passed, he maintained his solitary investigation against the
diminishing odds of resolution. He kept it up in part to take his mind off Lindsay’s death and to rescue himself from bitterness and self-absorption. A shrink would probably say that his obsession was rooted in a quest for his lost family—a need to find closure. Maybe so.
Lindsay was seven months pregnant when she was killed. The little boy she was carrying died with her.
Greg took Joe Steiner’s fax and walked down the hall to the office of Lieutenant Detective T.J. Gelford, his supervisor.
T.J. was on the phone, but he waved Greg in. When he hung up, he said, “That was Frank. He’s at CCMC with a cracked ankle. What else can go wrong?” He looked up at Greg. “What’s up?”
Greg handed T.J. the fax.
Gelford, who was in his late fifties, was not a large man. But he possessed a powerful presence. His hair had been buzz-cut so close to his scalp that it looked like a shadow. He had a roughly hewn rawboned face and gray implacable eyes that could with a microflick go from neutral to withering scorn. Gelford looked at the fax then looked up at Greg. “So?”
“It may be something,” Greg said. “I want to check it out.”
“What’s to check out?”
“He says there are similarities. I want to see what they are.”
Gelford took in a long scraping breath of air and let it out through his teeth in a hiss. “Greg, a dozen times I’ve told you to leave that case alone, there’s nothing there.”
“I hear you, but it’s the first time we’ve got something on the markings.”
Gelford looked at him with that flat, chastening glare. “Yeah, and what you got is coincidence. Natural coincidence.”
“That’s what I want to check out.”
Gelford leaned forward the way he did when he wanted to press a point. “You have chased after every damn shadow, every nibble, every look-alike. I let you go halfway across the country and back on this—twice. You’ve eaten up my budget, not to mention the assistance funds for those software people to run those photosuperimposition screens. I’m up to here with that damn skull kid. You’re not spending your time correctly on your cases, and frankly that pisses me off.”
“And frankly I’m tired of the shit cases I’ve been assigned—stolen bikes, kids drinking, wallet snatches—they’re not even real crimes or ones that can be solved.”
“Maybe if you did what you’re told and dropped this thing, you wouldn’t be getting shit cases. You aren’t solving the ones you’re supposed to anyway.”
Gelford was right, and although he complained to his face, when Greg got home at night he fessed up. He’d go through the motions of investigating something, but he’d be only half there. “Joe Steiner doesn’t make calls unless he’s got something.”
“And Joe Steiner isn’t short of manpower,” Gelford shot back.
“Two hours, T.J. That’s all I’m asking. Two hours. If it’s nothing, I’ll bury it.”
“Bullshit.”
“It’s not bullshit. Just two hours.”
Gelford picked up the A.M. docket from a pile of papers. “Yeah, two hours of wild-goose chasing, while I’m looking at three domestics, an assault and battery, one victim in critical condition. A sniper’s shooting pellets at motorists on Route 3, some asshole kids trashed the high school last night, and vacationers are pouring in by the thousands. You want some real crimes, I’ve got some for you.”
Greg checked his watch. “Back by noon, I promise.” He smiled, hoping to decharge the moment.
But Gelford did not smile back, nor did his manner soften. “This is
not
what we’re paying you for.”
“T.J., I’ve got a hunch there’s a connection here.”
“That’s what you said the last time and twenty times before that. I’ve had it with your hunches up to here. Get ahold of yourself: The case is closed.”
Greg took a deep breath to center himself. “Someone, somewhere, has lost a kid. Someone, somewhere, still misses him and has his picture hanging up. He’s somebody’s son.”
“Yeah, but not yours.”
Greg felt the sting of that. It was the mind-set of the barracks—that Greg’s tenacity went beyond a professional determination, that it was borderline pathological. “Three years ago I made a promise to myself to find out who that kid was and what happened to him, and I intend to keep that promise.”
“That’s all nice and good, but nobody knows who the kid is, and not from the lack of trying,” Gelford added. “You and two other detectives from the state hunted for the next of kin full-time for eight weeks. You canvassed the schools, day-care centers, pediatricians, and hospitals. Twenty thousand fliers from that reconstruction were distributed Capeside and off. We flooded the Internet, even got a fifteen-grand reward. You scoured all the databases, chased down leads from I don’t know how many families looking for a son the same age. It’s been three years, Greg, three years and nobody’s called your hot line to claim him. What can I say? It’s a fucking dead end.”
He was right again. Given the department budget, they had pulled all the stops. And they had floated plenty of theories on why nobody had claimed the boy. He could have been abducted from out of state, far from the Cape and the publicity blitz; his parents could have died—maybe even with him—perhaps in a boating accident. His parents could be illegal immigrants, afraid to speak with police; or they could have even been the killers; or it could have been a cult murder. One possibility was as good as the next, and they pursued them all. But Greg refused to accept their finality or to let the child remain an unnamed, unclaimed victim of happenstance. Which was why he had taken the case on his own. Which was why after three years, the kid was like family.
“I’d do this after-hours,” Greg said, “but Steiner gets off work before I do. Please.”
Gelford picked up the fax. “I don’t know how to say this without saying it, but this obsession of yours has affected department morale. People are resenting how it’s getting in the way of your real obligations, how you’re not pulling your own weight. And so do I.” He stopped for a moment. “Frankly, Greg, it’s become something of a bad joke. They’re saying stuff like how you should stop whacking your stick on this skull—and how you should get a wife.”
Greg felt the blood rise in his face. He knew that he had distanced himself from the others, even dropping off the department softball team, and bowing out of picnics, and fishing jaunts. He was even aware that other investigators were refusing to work on cases with him, including his onetime partner, Steve Powers. But the thought that he had become a department joke was mortifying. Suddenly he saw himself as a pathetic fool chasing his own tail.
Get a
wife.
“This may be my hang-up, but I have not compromised my duties here.”
“That’s arguable,” Gelford said. “But you’ve been at this for three years, and you’re batting a dead mouse.” He handed back the fax.
Greg nodded, but said nothing.
“I think you might want to take a look,”
Steiner had written.
Gelford studied Greg’s face. “Noon, and not a minute over,” Gelford said. “But if this does not pan out—as I expect it won’t—you’ll bury it for good. Otherwise … you know the rest.” Gelford then picked up the phone to say that the conversation was over.
Greg folded the fax and put it in his shirt pocket.
“Similar
markings.”
“Thanks,” Greg said and left, his mind humming to get over to the ME’s office.
“
A
re you all right?” Martin asked.
“I’m fine,” Rachel said.
“Well, you don’t look it.”
“Don’t start.”
“Don’t start what? You look like you’re about to go to your own funeral.”
“I said I’m fine.”
They were in the kitchen, and Rachel was making pancakes. She was still in her bathrobe, hunched over the stove, pressing chocolate chips into the frying batter. Dylan loved chocolate-chip pancakes, and she made them for him at least once a week. Martin was dressed and ready to go to work.
The bouquet of roses he had bought last night sat in a vase on the dining room table. They had never made it to the Blue Heron. Rachel said she wasn’t up for it.
“You want pancakes?” she asked, her voice void of inflection. Her face was ashen and the flesh under her eyes was puffy. Her hair was disheveled and stuck back by a couple of hasty bobby pins. She looked as if she hadn’t slept all night.
“I’ll just have some orange juice,” he said and poured a glass. “I’ve got a breakfast meeting with Charlie O’Neill on the road.”
She nodded woodenly. He hated it when she got in these moods. Upstairs Dylan could be heard singing while getting dressed. He liked show tunes, and at the moment he was wailing “Bess, You Is My Woman Now.”
Martin studied Rachel while he drank his juice. She looked miserable,
standing there hunched over like an old woman, her feet stuffed into a pair of old slippers, her face looking as if it had been shaped out of bread dough. “So, there’s nothing you want to tell me?”
“I said
I’m fine,”
she snapped.
“Then how come we haven’t made love for over three weeks?”
Her body slumped in annoyance, but she didn’t answer.
“How come you’ve been avoiding me like I’m the goddamn Ebola virus?”
Without looking up from the pan she said, “I haven’t been avoiding you. And stop swearing, he’ll hear you.”
“You
have
been avoiding me. For weeks I’ve suggested we go out to dinner together, or a movie or something nice and romantic, but you’re too tired. You don’t feel up to it. You’ve got a headache. You go to bed early. Except for bumping into me, I don’t think you’ve physically touched me in weeks. Something’s wrong, and I want to know what the hell it is.”
Rachel continued staring into the pan, then slowly she turned her head toward him. She seemed just about to respond but then laid the spatula down and went to the bottom of the stairs and called up to Dylan that breakfast was ready.
When she returned, Martin said, “I don’t know what the problem is, but you’ve been moping around here like you’ve got some goddamn—”
Suddenly she let out a scream, shaking her hand. She had burned the tip of her finger pressing chocolate chips into the batter.
Martin ran to her and put his arm around her shoulder. She was not just whimpering in discomfort. She was outright screaming, as if in outrage that the pan had done this to her. Then, she burst into tears.
Martin walked her to the sink and turned on the cold water and held her hand under it. With one arm around her shoulder, the other hand holding hers under the water, he could feel her shaking as she stood there, deep wracking sobs rising from a place that had nothing to do with burnt fingers.
“Mommy! What happened?” Dylan ran into the kitchen and instantly froze in place at the tableau of Martin holding Rachel’s finger under the streaming water and Rachel crying, tears pouring freely from her eyes and her nose running.
“Mommy just burned her finger,” Martin said. “She’s going to be fine.”
“Mommeee.” Dylan ran over to her and hugged her about the middle and buried his face into her bathrobe, then he began to cry.
“It’s burning!” Rachel shouted through her tears. “Turn it off.”
On the stove smoke billowed up from the frying pan.
“It’s burning,” Dylan screamed. “Fire!”
I’m going to lose my fucking mind
, Martin thought, as he shot to the stove, turned off the gas, and pulled the pan off the burner.
Suddenly the smoke alarm went off, filling the house with a hideous electronic wail.
While Dylan yelled, his hands to his ears, and Rachel stood by the sink crying, Martin pulled out a kitchen chair.
Yup! Any second now I’m gonna hear a snap like a celery stalk, and then I can join the chorus, screaming and blubbering. Yoweeeee!
He punched off the alarm.
The pancakes looked like smoking hockey pucks. Martin felt the crazy urge to laugh, but pushed it down. Instead he tore a couple of sheets off the paper-towel rack and handed them to Rachel. While she dried her face, Dylan insisted that she hold her finger up so he could kiss the boo-boo.
Just another normal little breakfast scene in the happy Whitman household.
“I think you’re going to make it,” Martin said, looking at her finger, “thanks to ole Dr. Dylan here.” He winked at his son. The tip of Rachel’s index finger was a white crust of burnt skin. Martin tousled his son’s hair. “You made her feel better already, right?”
Rachel nodded and caught her breath. She smiled thinly and gave her son a hug.
Seeing Rachel pull herself together again, Dylan rapidly repaired. “Am I going to be a doctor when I grow up?”
“I don’t see why not,” Martin said. “You’ve got the touch. Now maybe you should go upstairs and put the other shoe and sock on, okay, Doc?”
Dylan looked to Rachel. “Take two ass burns and call me in the morning,” he said, and headed upstairs. It was something Martin said all the time.
Rachel nodded, then headed for the stove to clean the frying pan. Her body had slumped into itself again.
Martin came over to her and gave her a hug. She let him, but it was like hugging a dead person. “Are you going to be okay?”
“Yeah.”
“Sure?”
She nodded.
“Are you going to tell me about it?”
She shook her head. “Nothing to tell,” she whispered.
“I don’t believe you. And
you
don’t believe you.” He kissed her on the forehead. “You never were a good liar.”
Her eyes filled with tears again. “You’re going to be late for your meeting. Say hello to Charlie.”
He nodded. “I love you, woman, but I wish you’d let me in.”
She hugged him weakly, and he left.
He was right: She never was a good liar.
Rachel watched Martin pull out of the driveway. She cleaned the pan and made another batch of pancakes. When she was done, she called Dylan down. And while he ate, she got dressed.
A little before nine o’clock she dropped Dylan off at DellKids and headed toward Rockville, which was nearly forty miles south of Hawthorne. They had thought of finding a local pediatrician, but Dr. Rose had attended Dylan since his infancy. And Rachel liked the man. More importantly, Dylan liked him. He was a warm and gracious man who never rushed through an examination.
To get to the highway, Rachel headed down Magnolia Drive, trying to ease her mind against the fugue playing inside her head.
Had the MRI results been normal, the doctor would have called himself and just said things looked fine. If there was a problem, he would surely have called himself—unless he didn’t get the chance because of the emergency. Maybe he wanted to talk to her about some special learning programs for Dylan.
Yes, think Special Program,
she told herself.
Special Program. Nice and normal. No problems. No tumors. No …
It was her idea to have the scan in the first place, and Dr. Rose had agreed—a good precautionary measure since the procedure was easy and noninvasive.
Normal procedure. Normal precaution.
That was what she had told herself. Her cover story to herself.
As Rachel drove along, she felt the onslaught of an anxiety attack. She tried to concentrate on the scenery, tried to distract herself by taking in the arborway of maples and oaks and the seaside mansions that clutched the rocky coastline—mansions with their driveway entrances of granite pillars, some surmounted with large alabaster pineapples that forbade you to enter. The
road opened up to a sea view and a scattering of shingled homes with deep and closely cropped lawns, sculpted hedges, and trellised gardens festooned with rose blossoms. In the distance, powerboats cut quicksilver plumes across the harbor under a brilliant blue sky.
It was all so perfect. All so good and pure. And now she was going to see if she had destroyed her son.
As she drove down Route 93 toward Rockville, her mind tripped back.
It had started rather casually—like the occasional cough that develops into pneumonia or the dull ache in the left arm that throbs its way to triple bypass surgery. The prelude was a casual note that came in the mail one day early last fall:
Dear Mrs. Whitman,
As you know, we have a parentlteacher’s conference in two weeks, but
I’m wondering if we could meet sooner—possibly next week,
No
big problem, but I’d
like to discuss Dylan’s
progress …
It was signed Karen Andrews, Dylan’s teacher. They had enrolled him in a Montessori preschool in Plymouth because the place had one of the best reputations on the South Shore. It also had an admissions waiting list two years long. Not taking any chances and determined to get the very best for their son, Rachel and Martin had entered Dylan’s name when he was eighteen months old. He was four when he started.
She could still recall how excited he was—how excited they all were. For weeks before opening day, they would lie down with him at bedtime and he would count the intervening days. When it finally arrived, Rachel had dressed him in blue plaid shorts, a white polo shirt, and new white and blue striped sneakers, of which he was very proud. With his hair, a shiny chestnut color, parted neatly on the side, and his big green eyes and sweet pink mouth, he looked positively gorgeous. Because of the occasion, Martin took the morning off so they could all go together. Rachel believed in rituals, and this occasion was tantamount to Dylan’s first birthday or Christmas.
Before they headed off, Rachel had directed Martin and Dylan into the front yard where she shot a roll of color prints. Later she would select the best
shots and put them in a special album of first-schoolday photos, documenting Dylan’s progress from then to college.
The note arrived in mid-October—the sixteenth, to be exact. Ms. Andrews wanted to set up a conference with Rachel and Martin. They agreed on a day; but because Martin was unexpectedly out of town, Rachel met with the teacher herself.
Karen, a sincere and dedicated woman, began by saying that Dylan was an adorable and sweet child, a view shared by the entire staff. She also went on to say that he loved music and had a beautiful voice, and that he was popular with the other children. “He’s very sociable and very caring of the other kids,” she said. “He also has a great sense of humor, and gets the kids laughing.”
Rachel nodded, thinking this was leading to a complaint that Dylan was too much the class clown, working up the other kids to rowdiness. It wouldn’t take much to encourage him—just a couple of laughs to put him on a roll. But would clowning around be reason for a parental conference? “So what’s the problem?”
“Well, his language.”
“His language?” Maybe Dylan had picked up some swears from Martin.
“He seems to have some difficulty accessing and processing words. Each morning we go to the big wall calendar and put a Velcro star on that day. But first we recite the days of the week in unison. Dylan doesn’t know them. He doesn’t remember from day to day. He also doesn’t know what year it is, even though it’s written down in large letters and we do this every day.”
“Is that so unusual at his age?” It was possible that he was just a little behind the other kids. Martin himself didn’t learn to read until he was eight.
“No, but he also has problems with comprehending What? Where? When? questions. If I ask him ‘What day is it?’ he’ll just repeat the question. Or if I ask ‘Where are the crayons?’ he’ll just answer ‘Crayons’ or repeat the question. He doesn’t seem to understand some basic language concepts. I mean, you must have observed these things at home.”
She had but thought it was just his age. That he would grow out of the problem.
“The same in reading group,” Ms. Andrews continued. “To make story time interactive, I read a few sentences then ask the children what they think about this or that or what do they expect will happen next. And we go right
around the circle so each child gets a chance to respond and be rewarded for his or her input. But when it’s Dylan’s turn, he often won’t recall what the story was about or what’s been said about it.”
Rachel began to feel an uneasiness grip her. “What do you think the problem is?”

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