I slid on the edges of my feet down the icy slope and ordered Barter out of the way. Maybe because he didn’t know what else to do, he handed the boy to me. I felt beneath the jaw for the carotid artery. There was no pulse. I bit down on the icy tips of my glove and yanked it off with my teeth. The bare skin of my palm detected no breath from either the nose or open mouth.
Carefully, I placed the boy flat on the frozen ground. I eased my broken hand out of the parka and spread my screaming fingers below Travis Barter’s sternum. I pressed my good hand atop the shattered one, gulped down a big breath, and began a series of thirty compressions. The intensity of the pain made me grit my molars, but I continued CPR. After I’d completed thirty compressions, I wiped my eyes and tilted the boy’s head back gingerly. I covered his mouth with mine and administered two rescue breaths.
Still no pulse.
Heedless of the pain, I started pumping the boy’s chest again. Thirty compressions, followed by two rescue breaths. Then feel for a pulse. Thirty compressions and two rescue breaths. Then feel for a pulse. I wondered how long I could keep going before I passed out from the agony.
I pressed two fingers to Travis Barter’s neck. Blood was moving through the artery. The pulse was faint. I pressed my ear to his mouth and felt the damp heat of his breath.
The boy was alive, but for how long?
It took half an hour for a deputy to arrive on the scene and half an hour more before the emergency medical technicians showed up. Cars were off the road all over the peninsula, the deputy told me. Frozen branches were snapping everywhere, bringing down electrical wires. Power lines were sizzling and snapping, rendering roads impassable. The ice storm was shaping up to be the worst in years.
I watched the EMTs secure Travis Barter’s neck and head with a brace and carefully strap him to a stretcher. His body was as floppy as a sock puppet. The medical people exchanged worried looks.
While the ambulance crew ministered to the injured teenager, Calvin Barter stood beside his ruined vehicle, muttering obscenities. His long black beard grew high on his cheekbones, so that little of his face showed beside his coal black eyes. His chest and belly wanted to burst loose from his mud-splattered snowsuit, and his boots were sizable enough for Bigfoot to wear. Even his hands were gargantuan. I wondered how those thick fingers could ever button a shirt.
I waited for the deputy-my buddy Skip Morrison-to set up some emergency beacons. Then I took him aside. I explained about the ATV vandalism case and how I’d chased Barter and the boy through the woods. I told him about crashing my sergeant’s ATV, and he gave me a pitying look. I didn’t mention my broken hand, just kept it tucked inside my parka, out of sight. My fingers were throbbing. I could feel the knuckles beginning to swell.
Skip left me for a while to go take a statement from the plow truck’s driver.
Barter insisted on helping the EMTs levitate the stretcher with the boy on it out of the ditch. No one dared refuse the giant man. In truth, he probably could have lifted the heavy gurney on his own and toted it all the way to the hospital in Rockport on his back.
As the EMTs were packing to leave, Skip came slipping and sliding back to me. “The plow driver says they were riding in the middle of the road with their lights off, for some reason.”
“They were fleeing from me,” I explained.
“You saved that kid’s life, Mike.”
“Let’s hope so.”
“Do you want me to help you arrest Barter?”
“Not here,” I said. “But I’d appreciate your filling out the accident report.”
“Sure thing. That guy is seriously bad news. I think half the high school kids around here get their pills from him.” He wiped melted water from his chin. “Did you hear someone sighted Westergaard?”
It took a moment for the name to register. “What? No.”
“They got a report about his Range Rover being seen in Massachusetts. But it’s not definite.”
I knew this was potentially big news, but somehow I couldn’t bring myself to care. Between the kid and my hand, I had enough on my mind. “I’m going to follow the ambulance to the hospital.”
“Maybe you should get a doctor to check you out,” he said. “You look a little green.”
I caught a ride with the plow driver back to the tote road where I’d hidden my truck. He was a greasy-haired, pimple-faced dude, scarcely out of high school, and he didn’t say a single word to me while we were on the road together.
“Don’t blame yourself,” I told him. “They shouldn’t have been in the road like that with their lights off.”
The driver looked at me as if I’d just muttered something to him in Swedish.
“Are you going to be OK?” I asked him.
“No,” he said.
The ice had encased my pickup in an opaque shell. I had to chip away at the seams of the door with my multitool before I could pry it open. Once inside, I ran the heater and defrosters full blast, hoping they would melt the windshield ice and spare me the labor of scraping it clear. I cradled my right hand on my lap. Very carefully, tugging each finger one by one, I removed my glove. Every little twitch sent jolts of pain up my forearm. My fingers were visibly swollen. The image that came to mind was of hot dogs expanding in a microwave.
I used my cell phone to call home.
Sarah picked up immediately. “Mike? Where the hell are you?”
“I got sidetracked. I’m sorry about missing Amy’s party.”
“She canceled it on account of the storm. I’ve been worried about you. The roads are horrible!”
“I’m going to be a while longer,” I said through clenched teeth. “That guy I was looking for-Hank Varnum’s ATV vandal-crashed his machine. I’m following the ambulance to the hospital. A boy who was riding with him was injured.”
“A boy? What’s his name?”
“Travis Barter.”
“Oh my God! I have the Barter twins in my class-Jud and Julie. What happened to Travis? Is he going to be all right?”
“I don’t know.”
She took a long time to respond. “Your voice sounds strange.”
“The ambulance is leaving and I need to get going.”
“Call me from the hospital. And please drive safely. It’s such a dangerous night. I’ve had this feeling of foreboding all afternoon.”
“I’ll be home soon.”
I checked my voice mail. There was a message from Kathy Frost, asking for an update. I’d call her later. Maybe by then I’d have an excuse for demolishing her ATV.
There was also voice mail from Charley. “I picked up some info on the q.t.,” he said. “The state police found a print on that telephone outside Smitty’s Garage. It belongs to Mark Folsom, the owner of the Harpoon Bar. That’s an interesting wrinkle, don’t you think? Give me a call when you can, young feller.”
The defroster was having no effect whatsoever on the rimed windshield. I got out and started scraping the glass until, at long last, my truck emerged from its frozen chrysalis.
I could barely process Charley’s message. Was the anonymous caller who reported Ashley Kim’s accident Nikki Donnatelli’s former boss? At the moment, I was in no condition to chase that particular rabbit down the trail.
I drove myself one-handed to the hospital. Sarah and Skip were right: The road was treacherous. At intervals, I felt as if I were driving on sheer glass. Falling rain glittered like diamonds in my headlights. There was an eerie beauty to this night. Every tree branch and hanging wire seemed coated with a pastry glaze.
On my way off the peninsula, I passed several cars off the road and slowed down for each one, but the drivers had disappeared as utterly as Ashley Kim. For their sake, I hoped they had met real Samaritans on the road instead of the monster I knew to be lurking somewhere in the darkness.
At the hospital, I parked in a surprisingly crowded lot and dragged myself through the automatic doors of the emergency room.
The white-haired woman behind the admissions desk looked up from her computer screen with a tentative smile, as if she recognized my face but couldn’t quite place where we’d met. “Can I help you?”
“An ambulance brought in a boy just now. The name’s Barter. He was in an ATV accident. I need to know how he’s doing.”
She pursed her cracked lips. “I’m not supposed to disclose the status of any patients-even to law-enforcement officers.”
“Can I speak to the nurse supervisor or a security guard?”
With a sweep of her hand, she motioned me to a row of chairs. “Please have a seat, and someone will be with you shortly.”
The ER waiting room was peopled with the usual motley crew of injured, ill, and intoxicated persons. Some were casualties of the storm-people who had fallen on the ice or careened their vehicles into snowbanks. But others were just poor folk for whom the emergency room was the only means of getting medical care. A single television set provided the official entertainment, but the remote control was in the hands of a chunky girl with a pierced nose and attention deficit disorder. She would linger on a channel for five seconds and then move on, unsatisfied, to the next.
The security guard arrived first. He emerged through the sliding doors with an expression of alarm. He was a heavyset guy, but he looked strong in the way that some fat men are, impressively muscled beneath the blubber.
“What’s the problem, Warden?”
With my functioning hand, I pointed to an unpeopled corner of the room, beyond the Coke machine. “Can we talk over there?”
When we were out of earshot of the other patients, I explained. “An ambulance just brought in a boy named Travis Barter, who was injured in an ATV crash down in Seal Cove. He’s here with his father, a guy named Calvin Barter. I need to arrest the old man on a bunch of charges, but the boy is in bad shape, and I don’t want to drag his father from his bedside. On the other hand, this Barter guy is potentially dangerous, so I need you to call the Rockport police and get an officer over here. I want to wait for the mother to show up before we bust the father.”
“What did the guy do?”
“Endangering a minor, failure to stop for an officer, driving to endanger, felony vandalism-it’s a long list. Tell the responding officer to meet me in the waiting room. You might want to hang out in the ER in the meantime. Take my word for it. Barter’s trouble.”
The guard had been listening attentively to me the whole time, and I had the impression that he was good at his job. “Ten-four,” he said.
I returned to my place between the ADD girl with the remote control and a drunk-looking guy pressing a bloody ice pack to the side of his head. The television stations flashed by overhead-infomercial, black-and-white movie, basketball game. The drunk guy stared at the screen, spellbound by the kaleidoscopic effect.
Frayed magazines and yellowed newspapers were fanned out across the table in front of me. I glanced absently at the covers, trying to keep my mind off the pulsing sensation in my hand. A headline from the
Boston Globe brought me up short: BAY STATE WOMAN FOUND MURDERED IN MAINE
The picture of Ashley Kim that accompanied the article showed a face I barely recognized, a cute young woman with intelligent eyes and a wry smile-as if the photographer had captured her enjoying a private joke.
The story said that Ashley Kim was twenty-three years old, a native of San Jose, California, now a resident of Cambridge, and a graduate student at the Harvard Business School. She had told friends that she was going cross-country skiing in Maine, which was unusual, since no one knew she skied.
The article reported, accurately, that she had called the rental company about hitting a deer shortly before she vanished. It named Trooper Curtis Hutchins as the responding officer and questioned why he hadn’t gone to greater lengths to search for her. In response, there was a quote from the spokesman for the Department of Public Safety, who said that it was Trooper Hutchins’s understanding that Ashley was uninjured and that she had left the scene of the accident willingly. The spokesman also noted that an internal investigation would review the actions the trooper had taken or failed to take. The choice of those particular words doesn’t bode well for Hutchins, I thought.
The article said that Kim’s body had been found at the summer home of one of her Harvard Business School professors, Hans Westergaard, of Cambridge. According to investigators, Westergaard was “a person of interest,” and the public was asked to report any information they might have about his whereabouts. His wife, Jill, hadn’t responded to phone calls.
“You wanted to see me?”
I looked up from the paper at a strong-looking woman in blue-green scrubs standing over me. She had wiry black hair, thin lips, and dark circles under her eyes.
“You’re the head nurse?” I asked.
“I’m the ER supervisor, and I’m extremely busy. We’ve got a packed house tonight. What can I do for you, Warden?”
Both the ADD girl and Mr. Ice Pack were gawking at us. I hobbled over to my familiar corner behind the Coke machine. “You admitted a boy a while ago named Travis Barter,” I said. “He was seriously injured in an ATV crash. How’s he doing?”
“You know that’s privileged information.”
“Look, I was chasing him at the time. The ATV he and his father were riding was struck by a snowplow because they were trying to get away from me.”
The taut line of her mouth relaxed and the small muscles around her eyes softened. “The kid was thrown pretty hard,” she said. “That’s really all I can say.”
“I understand.” I removed my right hand from the inside of my warden’s parka. The knobby fingers had started turning black. “I think I hurt my hand.”
“Jesus Christ!” she said.
“It’s bad, then?”
She cocked an eyebrow at me. “When an ER nurse says ‘Jesus Christ,’ it usually means it’s bad. We need to get a doctor to look at you. Have you filled out an admissions form?”
“No.”
“You need to do that first.”
I hobbled back to the admissions desk and my girlfriend behind the counter.
“I told you you’d have to wait your turn,” she said triumphantly.
After I had been formally processed at the admissions desk, I returned to my perch beside the guy with the ice pack. The ADD girl had vanished. By coincidence, she had left the TV tuned to a show about real-life cops. On the screen, a documentary crew was riding in a squad car through the mean streets of Denver. The shaky camera followed two officers as they arrested a series of belligerent, moronic, and inebriated lowlifes who resembled, in many ways, the people seated around me.
I was entranced with the show by the time the outside doors slid open and Wanda Barter and her red-haired clan blew in on a cold and damp gust of air. There were six of them, from the freckled teenager with the freckled baby down to the little girl who had greeted me the first day I visited their farm. I recognized the twins, the boy and girl Sarah had mentioned were students in her class. Despite the storm, not a single one of the children was wearing a winter coat.
“Where’s my baby?” Wanda wailed at the admissions clerk. “Where’s Travis?”
I considered approaching Mrs. Barter to convey my sadness about the tragic turn of events but then thought better of becoming the outlet for her considerable anger. After a few minutes of Wanda’s shouting and wailing, a nurse appeared from the trauma center to take the Barter family into the ICU to see the injured boy.
Instead of the Rockport cop I was expecting, I was surprised to see Kathy Frost appear at the hospital door. She stepped in out of the rain and pushed back her wet hair from her streaming face. She spotted me within seconds and came striding across the room, boots squeaking, with the scowl of an irate mother. “Where’s my ATV?”
“I crashed it.”
“You what?”
“I crashed it while pursuing Calvin Barter. It’s in the woods near Hank Varnum’s house. How did you know to look for me here?”
“I called Sarah, and she told me about Barter’s boy. How is he?”
“They won’t say.”
Water was dripping down her forehead into her eyes, causing her to blink. “Goddamn it, Mike. How could you crash my ATV?”
“I rolled it on an icy hill.” I held up my mangled paw. “I think I broke my hand.”
Her lips pulled away from her teeth. “Yeah, I’d say you did. Jesus, that’s disgusting. But it doesn’t get you off the hook.”
What happened next was so abrupt, it caught me entirely off guard. One of the Barter kids must have noticed me sitting in the waiting room, because suddenly Calvin Barter came rushing out of the trauma center, shouting obscenities. Kathy scarcely had time to dodge to one side before the bearded ogre threw himself at me.
“Fuck you! Motherfucker!”
I put up my good hand to defend my face from the punches he was hurling at my head, but I ended up falling backward onto my injured wrist. A burst of pain from my hand turned my vision bloodred. Then a punch connected with my temple, knocking me against the seat back.
I kicked hard at Barter’s knee while Kathy sprung on him from behind, wrapping her forearm around his windpipe. The fat security guard was suddenly there, too, pulling at one of my assailant’s forearms. All three of them went down with a crash, breaking the legs of the magazine table.
By the time my vision had cleared, I saw Kathy cuffing Barter’s hands behind his back while the overweight guard sat on his head.
An hour or so later, I was sitting on a high table waiting for a doctor to examine me. My hand had swollen to the size of a catcher’s mitt.
At last, the ER doctor popped around the curtain. He was the same little blond guy who’d stitched up my arm a few nights earlier.
“And how are we doing tonight?” he asked.