by Joe Flanagan
Suddenly, he was free. His neck was all searing pain and his vision was strange, but he could see Stasiak a few feet away holding a hand to his face. There was a dark liquid dripping off his elbow, like oil. Stasiak reached for his weapon and Warren lunged at him. He had one hand on Stasiak’s wrist. In the other he held the broken antenna. Stasiak grabbed him by the throat and squeezed. Warren stuck him in the side of the neck, and when Stasiak only made a face—almost a demonic grin, his teeth red with blood—he did it again. Stasiak let go of him then and fell on one knee. He fired his pistol blindly and struck the side of the car. Warren circled around behind him. Stasiak was unaware, holding the side of his neck. He tried to see where Warren was, rotating stiffly at the waist. He fell on his back, then rolled over and tried to get up on his elbows, but could not. Warren tore the pistol from Stasiak’s grip. Blood was pumping from a hole in his neck. Warren secured the weapon, then tore a section of Stasiak’s shirt free and wadded it up. He pressed it into the wound and watched as the headlights of an oncoming car lit the ravine.
Driving down the dark roads on his way home from the late shift at a radio station down Cape, the disc jockey slowed as a bloodied figure emerge from the woods. He rolled his window down just far enough to speak. “Did you wreck?”
The man seemed unable to speak.
“Get in. I’ll take you to the hospital.”
“It’s not me. There’s another man. He’s got a neck injury. He’s bleeding to death.”
Stasiak’s weight was nearly more than they could bear. Warren kept a thumb pressed against the puncture wound in his neck. If he released it, blood shot out in great squirts. They fell twice, Stasiak tumbling to the ground like a stuffed dummy. His body was slick with blood and difficult to hold on to. By the time they got him to the pavement, all three were covered.
They loaded Stasiak into the backseat and sped toward Hyannis, the driver looking back at them in the rearview mirror. “How’s he doing?” he asked as they blew through Chatham. Warren didn’t answer. He sat there with his hand pressed hard against Stasiak’s neck, his head hanging down, weeping quietly.
The highway lights glistened off their blood-slick skin, their clothes giving off a sheen. The car smelled of it. The driver opened a window and spat. “How did you come to be out this way?” he asked. There was no response from the backseat. He shook his head. “Strange things happening tonight,” he said. “Coast Guard’s been running a cutter up and down the coast. Running in real close, too. Drug interdiction. They been doing it all summer. And that boy. That boy they found way up the hell in the middle of nowhere.”
Warren raised his head. “What did you say?”
“The boy. Coast Guard helicopter spotted a boy in Wellfleet, all by himself, way up the middle of nowhere. Must have wandered off or something, but that’s way far away from anywhere, up there. How the hell they could see him in the middle of the night, I don’t know.”
“Is he alive?”
“Oh, he’s alive. They sent somebody down to get him.”
When they arrived at the hospital, the shooting victims from the Kismet had just arrived. The emergency room entrance was crowded with police cruisers and a group of state troopers and Barnstable cops stood outside. The disc jockey got out and approached them. “I’ve got two men hurt in the backseat. One of them really bad. I don’t even know if he’s alive.”
The cops converged on the vehicle. It took them a moment to recognize Stasiak but when they did, the state police instantly coalesced into an aggressive, fanatically protective clan. Shock, anger, disbelief. They shoved back at the reporters, who rushed the car when they heard the name. They commandeered the emergency room and hustled the doctors out to the apron. Stasiak was carried inside, limp and bloody, the sight of him eliciting an outraged gasp from the officers.
Alone in the backseat, Warren closed his eyes. Mike was alive. Was he? The man said a little boy. They spotted a little boy. Could it be a different little boy? His breath started coming fast and he felt like he might hyperventilate. A Barnstable cop peered in. “Lieutenant?” he said, and then, to others, “Hey. This is one of ours.”
Hands reached in and gripped him gently.
“Can you move?”
“Were you in a wreck, lieutenant?”
They helped Warren out of the car. “You guys listen to me. Come here.” They gathered close around him so they could hear Warren’s weakened voice. “You have to get me out of here. I have to find my son. He’s lost. I think the Coast Guard might have located him out in the woods down Cape in Wellfleet somewhere. He’s missing.”
He saw the skepticism in their faces. “Sir,” one of them said, “you’re hurt.”
“I need to know if the Coast Guard found a kid out there in Wellfleet. Michael Warren. He’s got red pajamas on. He has blond hair, a crew cut. He’s seven years old.”
Suddenly Welke was there. He spoke in a low voice. “Break it up. Break it up, fellas. Let me see him.” He looked over the top of the car at the state cops gathered around the entrance. “I need to talk to the lieutenant. Gimme some room.”
“He’s hurt, Welke,” one of them said. “He needs a doctor.”
“I know he’s hurt. Just give me a minute with him.” He took Warren by the elbow and led him to one of the cruisers. “What happened?”
“Welke, you have to help me. I have to get out of here.”
“What the hell is going on?”
“I can’t get into all that right now. How about you drive me to the Coast Guard station?”
“You look awful. What happened to your neck? Looks like somebody tried to hang you.”
“Welke, please.”
They pulled away from the hospital in Welke’s cruiser, Warren slouched in the passenger seat. They drove for a long time in silence before Welke said, “I know everything.”
Warren didn’t say anything. He avoided looking at Welke.
“I know about Stasiak. I know about the rackets he’s involved in. I know a lot.”
“How . . .”
“Jenkins. I made him tell me. It’s not his fault. I figured some of it out on my own and I confronted him and he agreed to let me in on it.”
“Where is Jenkins?”
“I don’t know. Some suit met him at the motel and they drove off somewhere. FBI. That’s what I heard. I don’t know what that’s about yet.”
“What motel?”
“There was a gun battle at this motor lodge on 28. Me and Jenkins and the staties had it out with a bunch of guys from the Elbow Room. We killed two of them.”
“How did all that happen?”
“I don’t know yet. Jenkins went out there for some reason and that’s when it started.”
Welke called ahead to the Coast Guard station and they were met at the gate by a petty officer who confirmed that they had picked up Mike in the bluffs a short distance from the shore in Truro. The officer escorted them past two parked helicopters and an amphibious aircraft to a two-story concrete building. “It’s a lucky thing we spotted him,” he said. “We weren’t even looking for him. We were running an interdiction patrol up the coast—narcotics.”
Inside, they directed Warren down a corridor and at the far end he saw Mike sitting in an office with a cookie in one hand and a carton of milk in the other, his feet swinging back and forth. He put them down and got up, running out to meet his father. Warren fell to his knees and embraced his son, his hand on the back of the boy’s head, pushing it into his shoulder. The release, the gratitude was ecstatic. For a moment he was not in the world but somewhere else, drifting, subsumed by an unfamiliar bliss, his father somehow present, peaceful, smiling, blessing the moment.
51
As news about what had happened at the Kismet came out, the men at the Elbow Room decided to dismantle everything and shut the place down. They nearly succeeded but were still work
ing at it when Baldesaro and his team of FBI agents showed up. They had stripped the walk-in completely but all their equipment was in the trunks of their cars. Betting slips, money, lists, records, and everything else that identified the Elbow Room as a bookmaking operation were discovered intact.
Jenkins went with another group of agents to the house on Depot Road, where they arrested a number of people and found illegal weapons and a large quantity of cash. Brinkman’s yielded paper records related to bookmaking, but Stasiak’s house near the beach was absolutely clean.
In Boston, FBI agents raided the bar Ava had revealed and discovered that it was serving as a back-alley bank and money laundering service for Grady Pope’s network of bookmakers, exchanging cash for the checks Frank Semanica delivered weekly. This made it possible for bettors to pay with checks written out to fictitious recipients and to bet larger amounts than would be possible in an all-cash system.
An FBI agent picked Warren and Mike up at the Coast Guard air station and drove them back to General Patton Drive. When they pulled up to the house, Grayson and James from Antiquitus came out and walked toward them. “Thank God you’re all right,” said Grayson. “My God, what did they do to you?”
The agent looked at them. “Who are you people?”
“We’re friends,” said James.
“Everybody get inside.”
Warren put Mike in the shower, then wrapped him in a towel and put him in his bed. Then he got under the water himself, his cuts and abrasions stinging. James and Grayson sat at the dining room table talking with Henry Sherman. The FBI man told them all to stay away from the telephone and took up vigil at a front window. When Warren got out of the shower he walked stiffly to his room and found Mike in his bed. He pulled the shades and lay down beside his son, who said, “What are we going to do now, Dad?”
Warren was already almost asleep. “We’re going to take a nap, Mike.”
“And then what?”
“We’ll be together.”
The boy slung an arm across his father’s chest and they drifted off to the low, soft voices in the house.
When information began leaking out to the public, the press descended on the Cape. No one seemed to know what the story was: a gunfight at a run-down motel in Hyannis, a celebrated state policeman who’d had a stroke during emergency surgery for a stab wound to his neck, another found shot to death at some abandoned cottages, a boy abducted by a priest who was a suspect in the child murders and, miraculously, found unharmed. As reporters were struggling to put everything together, news came of a federal raid that exposed an extensive gambling and extortion racket that had been operating on the Cape for six months, and not only that, but that certain state police officers were involved, prominent among them Captain Dale Stasiak.
Lieutenant Colonel John Fitzgerald, head of the state police, was temperate in his response. He asked the Department of Justice to refrain from speaking to the media until more was known. The one name that kept coming up in all of this—William Warren—who was he? By now it was known that he had shot Heller and maimed Stasiak. They wanted him. Fitzgerald called the US attorney and said as much.
“He’s our primary witness and he risked a great deal to help us,” the attorney responded. “We’re not going to honor that request.”
“He murdered a state trooper, counselor.”
“In self-defense.”
“So he says.”
“Warren won’t be going anywhere. You file whatever you have to file but access to him is FBI only.”
Fitzgerald said, “Senator Kennedy will be having a meeting with the attorney general down in DC. The complexion of this whole thing may change after that.”
Detective Ferrell of the state police was designated the head of the task force on the child killings. Father Boyle, it seemed, had completely disappeared from the woods where Mike was found. They combed the area for days, even had the Coast Guard fly over the outer Cape but he was nowhere to be found. The prevailing theory was that he walked into the ocean and drowned.
Father Keenan and Mrs. Gonsalves hunkered down in the house as autumn deepened. The archdiocese of Boston sent an attorney and two priests to help him get through the daily business of running a parish. Worshippers saw a different man on the altar than the one they knew. Father Keenan moved slowly, uncharacteristically grave and fragile.
Detective Ferrell interviewed Mike about the night of his abduction. Baldesaro was present along with a lawyer from the US attorney’s office. “Now, Detective Ferrell,” said the attorney. “We understand you’re here to speak with Michael Warren regarding the events of October 4, specifically his kidnapping from his house and experience related to that.”
“Correct.”
“There will be no discussion of the current investigation into certain members of the Massachusetts state police or of Mr. Warren’s actions on the night of October 4 or the search warrants executed on October 5.”
“No.”
“Go ahead, then.”
Ferrell had Mike walk him through what happened. “So, after the Dairy Queen, was that when the car went ‘crooked,’ as you say?”
“Yes, and it went ‘bang’ too. Real loud.”
“Did you get hurt?”
“No, I was just scared. I cried.”
“And what happened then?”
“We walked in the woods and then we were in a big field.”
“Did he hurt you?”
“No.”
“What did he do when you were in the field?”
“He prayed.”
“He prayed?”
“Uh-huh. He put his hands on my head like this.”
“And what else?”
“He cried.”
“He cried.”
“Yup. He cried when the light came.”
“Now, what light was that?”
Mike put his hand up and made a motion to indicate the entire room. “A big light,” he said. “All around like that and that. And . . . just bright.”
“Did he hurt you at all? Did he touch you any place he shouldn’t have, like your private area?”
“No. He’s nice to me. He wouldn’t do that. Can I ask a question?”
“Sure.”
“Do you know where he went?”
“That’s what we’re trying to find out.”
Warren attributed the changes in his son’s behavior to the trauma of recent events. He was pensive and quiet, taking note of things around him with an attentiveness his father found unsettling somehow. What was unusual was the stillness. When Warren spoke to the boy, he looked back at him in the most peculiar way, an unfamiliar quality to his eyes.
The remarkable thing about Mike’s account of what happened out in Truro was that it never changed. He did not know what to make of the boy’s account of a sudden light. Warren suggested that perhaps it was the helicopter Mike was describing but he was firm in his claim that the helicopter came after the light. Father Boyle was standing by him, he said, when the light came.
“And then what?” Warren asked.
“And then it was like I took a nap. On the grass. I was lying down. I woke up and Father Boyle was gone. And then I heard the helicopter.”
A doctor came down from Children’s Hospital in Boston and met with Warren at Nazareth Hall. They sat alone in one of the classrooms. “Where are the sisters?” Warren asked.
“I’d just as soon we keep the sisters out of this for the time being,” the doctor said. “There have been some changes in your son and they’re . . . quite dramatic, for lack of a better description. The sisters are pragmatic, in general. But we don’t want to encourage any kind of . . . Well, we don’t want any mystery around what is likely a very explicable event.”
Warren searched for ways to explain the differences he saw in his son. The inscrutable quirkiness, the i
mpenetrable aspect of his personality had disappeared, and while it had been endearing in its way, it represented uncountable miles between son and father, the gulf between an impaired mind and the rest of the world, a distance that love would never bridge. The truth was Mike shocked him daily now with comments and observations that indicated a perceptiveness that thrilled and bewildered his father at the same time. Mike seemed to be growing, blooming before his very eyes.
His attempts to convey this to the doctor did not seem to be satisfactory. The doctor frowned and looked at his notes, at test results, at the contents of Mike’s file, which was spread across his desk. Warren tried to grasp the entire strange situation in his mind and wound up saying, “I don’t know what’s happening.”
After the meeting, he was pulling out of the driveway when Sister John Frances lumbered down the steps, black skirts flowing. She leaned into his window and pressed a scapular of St. Jude into his hand and then closed it with both of her own. “God has a special place in his heart for you, Mr. Warren,” she said. She released his hand and turned and went back up the steps without another word.
In mid-October, Phil Dunleavy went missing. His wife and sons said he had gone off to work as usual but he never came home. His office at the police station was as he had left it the day before. His unmarked was discovered on a service road near a cranberry bog ten miles outside New Bedford. Not long afterward, he was indicted for what the FBI alleged was his role in Stasiak’s and Pope’s illicit activity on the Cape. They had recruited him early, using him to keep them apprised of what Warren and Jenkins were up to, feeding them information.