Authors: Paul,Sharon Boorstin
the results must look questionable. But to be totally
frank, I've never seen a case quite like this one.
REP. O'CONNER: You'll have to be more specific, Dr
Hutton.
SEN. BROYLES: Try confusing us with a few details,
why don't you?
REP. O'CONNER: Senator -
DR HUTTON: As the report explains, we used the most sophisticated techniques in our ballistics analysis. But there are rules of physics, gentlemen, and, well-SEN. BROYLES: Well?
DR HUTTON; There are laws of nature, if you will, laws which can never be broken: a piece of inert matter, a lump of lead impacting on a living thing, should behave a certain way. But our findings - well, they don't seem to follow those laws. REP. O'CONNER: Which means - ? SEN. BROYLES: Which means that Hutton and his staff can't hack it.
REP. O'CONNER: Senator Broyles, if these outbursts don't cease, I'm afraid I will have to request that you excuse yourself from this committee. SEN. BROYLES: But we're talking about my wife!
DR HUTTON: Senator Broyles, please understamd that I share your frustration. I've been on the Bureau for thirty-two years and I have never seen a case where the cause of death was quite this - problematic. SEN. BROYLES: Problematic? Jesus Christ! REP. O'CONNER: With all due respect to the efforts of your staff, Dr Hutton, the senator has a point: this is not the organized presentation that we were promised when the Director appeared before our committee on April 27th. We were asssured there would be a complete analysis of the evidence, with relevant details clearly spelt out: caliber of bullet, direction of trajectory - type of weapon. Facts that can be put to use in an investigation.
DR HUTTON: I understand. But the details are the whole point. It doesn't appear -1 say
appear
-from the evidence that there was a bullet.
REP. O'CONNER: But she - the victim - was shot through the head. That was in your preliminary report. DR HUTTON: At first glance, yes. There appears to be an entry wound, like that made with a .32-caliber slug. But there was no exit wound. No sign of a bullet within the body. And-from the cause of death determined by the coroner in the autopsy, it was - well - it wasn't really as if the victim had been hit by a bullet at all. REP. O'CONNER: I'm afraid you lost me, Dr Hutton. DR HUTTON: You see, a bullet didn't seem to be the cause of death. It was cardiac arrest. Her heart just stopped. It was as though - as though she had been struck by lightning.
(EDITOR'S NOTE: At this point in the proceedings, Senator Broyles, evidently distraught, requested to be excused. Shortly thereafter, Representative O'Conner declared a recess until Dr Hutton and his staff could arrive at a more satisfactory report.)
Chapter 5
The Burning Man. Even before she knew the ship was on fire, Cassie saw him, a dark and fiery angel. And the faster he ran along the deck of the
Pandora,
the faster his cloak of flames engulfed him.
The decks were slick with oil, like the blood of some enormous butchered creature, and smoke gushed out of the portholes. Cassie was only four years old, and she couldn't see the flames at first, just women and children screaming as they clawed their way to the lifeboats. The ship was screaming, too, electrical wires sizzling, planking warping in the heat. When her mother turned to grab life jackets, Cassie was swept along by the stampeding crowd.
The Burning Man . . . everyone else was fighting to get into a lifeboat. Why was he fighting to reach her? she cried out in panic, and for a moment the Burning Man and her mother were both grabbing for her, his face so close that his breath scorched her skin. Then her mother clutched her hand, the sharp pointed fingers of her silver ring cutting into her palm. She dragged Cassie towards the railing.
In the water below, the light from the flames engulfing the
Pandora
gleamed in confused pools of magenta, scarlet and indigo. One by one the passengers leapt into the night ocean, escaping the stench of sulfur, the acrid smoke, helpless as a swarm of drowning insects. Only their heads showed above the water black with oil, heads that looked as if they had been severed from their bodies, screaming.
Cassie and her mother teetered at the railing overlooking the water, and the Burning Man seized on that moment of hesitation to make one final lunge.
Her mother shielded Cassie's body with her own, let the flames from the Burning Man lick at her, crawl up her legs, as Cassie watched in horror. Before the fire could reach Cassie too, Ann snatched her in her arms and jumped.
The shock of cold.
One look back to see the
Pandora
turning over, like an old horse dying, the boards splintering as it groaned oyer on its side. Her mother was swimming, dragging her frantically away from the boat so they wouldn't be sucked into the vortex of the whirlpool as the ship began to sink.
The Burning Man - he stood alone on the tilted deck, the flames engulfing him. Why didn't he jump into the water like the others?
Then he was swallowed up in smoke.
A gasp, and the seas swallowed Cassie, too. She floundered in the icy swells, water streaming into her mouth, her nostrils, and down her throat, infecting her with the blackness that she was certain must be death. The Chill was pulling her down, dissolving her in its acid, filtering into her veins, a transfusion with the blood of a corpse.
Even with her eyes closed she could feel them sinking, away from the smoke and oil and screams, down to death-still depths. It seemed hopeless: her mother struggled to claw her way back, fighting painfully upward, but the fiery shimmer of the surface was impossibly far away.
They had to make it. They had to. For even in the depths she feared that she could not escape the Burning Man, that even down there in the darkness, he would be lying in wait.
Cassie turned her face up to the gentle sunshine to escape the memory. The wind tangled her hair, whipped the long batik shirt she wore over her leotard against her leg, and she gripped the railing of the aft deck more tightly. It was always the same - first the memory that had haunted her since her mother's death, then the Chill shooting through her veins like a stream of needles, followed by a lingering nausea that left the bitterness of poison in her mouth, the sea-taste of bile. She had tried to bury the memory, but like a drowned corpse, it always floated to the surface. And only when the memory had spent itself, wound down like a dying clock, only when she felt her eyes rolling up into her head, on the verge of losing consciousness, did she feel the Chill ease its grip on her throat.
It was not an uncommon phenomenon, the psychiatrists in Washington had explained to her and her father: the death of a parent triggering a repressed childhood memory, linking it with a recent trauma. But they hadn't been able to explain why it was the same memory that had once paralyzed her mother, why the Chill that had afflicted Ann Broyles now afflicted Cassie. Since Cassie had watched the waves swallow up her mother at Woods Hole, her mother's sea phobia had seemed both reasonable and wise. And now that the tumor had lodged in her mind, she was sure nothing could remove it, certainly not the fruitless hours with pychiatrists she had suffered through.
The phobia had worsened, until Cassie had dreaded sleep, fearing that if she closed her eyes she might drown under dark fathoms, trapped too far beneath .the surface to claw her way up for breath. In their apartment in Georgetown, she had left the light on in her room at night, and had started rocking in bed, cradling herself with the rhythm her mother had once used in her lullabies, the tempo of a heartbeat. But still the memory had seized her. And though in reality she and her mother had finally been rescued from the icy waters by the Coast Guard, in Cassie's mind it no longer turned out that way. The memory had warped insidiously, so that the way she remembered it now, at age four she had drowned.
We should never have taken the ferry.
In summers past, they had taken the New England Airlines turboprop to Nantucket. Her mother had insisted on it. But Cassie asured her father that she could handle taking the
Nantucket Queen
for this first trip back to Cliffs Edge since her mother's death. From a distance, landlocked in Washington, it had seemed safe, but the moment the boat had churned away from the pier at Hyannis Port, into the moss-green waves, nausea had welled up, the taste of brine.
We never should have taken the ferry today.
The
Nantucket Queen,
molded of powder-blue fiberglass, had hard plastic seats like those on a bus. It could hardly have been more different from the
Pandora,
a floating antique of varnished mahogany and polished brass that had taken vacationers to and from the island for generations. That night nine years before, she and her mother had been guests on the final, gala voyage of the old steam ferry, before it was to have been turned into a dock-side restaurant and amusement arcade. Cassie's mind circled fitfully over the memory, a confusion of first-hand sensations dimly remembered, and newspaper clippings she had assembled much later. (According to the
Nantucket Standard
, the disaster of the night of July 13, 1972, had been sparked by the fireworks launched from the
Pandora's
aft deck. The rescue of Cassie and her mother - the only survivors - had been termed '
miraculous
.') Her mind wheeled, like the gulls over the ferry's wake, and she wondered if they were at the very point - about five miles out from the mainland - where the
Pandora
had gone down in fifty fathoms.
Like the cycle of a cruel mechanical toy, the Chill ground to a halt with a click and a stutter that caused a twinge of pain in the palm of Cassie's hand. She ran her thumb across the skin, searching for the scar. The wound from her mother's sharp ring that night on the
Pandora
had dwindled to a white line across her palm. The wound from where the ring had pierced her skin three months ago, on the scaffolding at Wood Hole, was still raw and red, slow to heal.
She ran her finger over the two scars. They intersected, like two snakes entwined on her palm. What would a palm-reader say, looking at her hand? she wondered. That her lifeline was longer than her mother's? Or that it, too, foretold death by drowning?
The two scars in her palm - there was one important difference between them. On the
Pandora,
the ring had cut her because her mother had refused to release her, because she had not allowed anything - not the flames, or the Burning Man, or the sea - to snatch Cassie out of her arms. But at Woods Hole, when Cassie could have saved her mother, the pain from the ring had made Cassie let go . . .
She ran her palm along the ferry's smooth fiberglass railing and the recent wound stung from the salt. She looked out into the waves, hunched against the wind like an old woman. 'I should have held on . . .' She spoke softly, her lips barely moving. 'I never should have let go of her.'
'Don't.' Her father put his arm around her. 'You didn't let her fall. You couldn't have stopped her from falling. She was already dead.' He sighed, and the guilt in his own voice surpassed Cassie's: 'That bullet. . .
whatever
it was that got her. It was meant for me . . . She was only standing there because of me . . .'
'She
wanted
to be there,' Cassie cut him off. 'I don't know what was going on with her, but it was like she
had
to be with you. Sometimes I think Mom knew ... I think she knew something was going to happen to you.'
'So it happened to her instead!'
'She loved you.'
'A lot of good it did her.'
It had become a ritual with them, Cassie knew, the father forgiving the daughter, the daughter forgiving the father, and none of it did a damn bit of good. But that didn't stop the ritual, or the need for it. 'Don't come down so hard on yourself,' she said.
He raked his fingers through the reddish stubble of his beard, a beard he had grown, she thought, to hide behind. The disguise hadn't worked. The hair had grown in raggedly, and it only made him look unkempt. 'Why the hell shouldn't I be hard on myself? I only got to the Hill in the first place because of her . . . Her confidence in me . . . Christ, when I was DA I put away some of the biggest racketeers in the country, but I can't do a goddamn thing to find the son-of-a-bitch that killed her . . .'
'You've done all that anyone could do.' But Cassie knew it was too easy to say that. So she blurted it out: 'What difference does it make if they find out who did it or not? Nothing can bring her back . . .' As soon as the words escaped her lips, she was sorry. For she knew that it was the pressure of the investigation, however futile, that had kept her father going, the slender hope of revenge that kept him sharp and energetic, instead of letting him sink into self-pity or depression, as she had. He said nothing, clenching and unclenching his fists, the knuckles black and blue from pummeling the punching bag in the Senate gym. 'I mean, look at you. You've worked your way down to fighting weight.'
He smiled bitterly at the term, which he had taught her. 'Fighting weight?' He stared at his hands. 'To fight what? I'm just shadowboxing, that's all. All my life I've tried to win by a knockout - when I boxed in the Navy, when I was DA. That was the way I won my elections - landslide. I hate split decisions . . . photo finishes. But this damn FBI thing . . . it's so gray . . . inconclusive. Dragging on and on without a definite suspect. For me, that's the worst . . .'