In A Heartbeat

by Rosalind Noonan

Genres: Family Life; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

From the acclaimed author of One September Morning comes a gripping new novel that explores one family's journey in the wake of a horrific crime and its unexpected aftermath. Kate McGann is wrenched from sleep by the 3 a.m. phone call every parent dreads. Her nineteen-year-old son, Ben, is lying unconscious in a Syracuse hospital after being attacked in his sleep by an unknown assailant with a baseball bat. While Kate waits, frantically wishing for Ben to wake up and take back his life, she tries to uncover who could have done something so brutal. Ben's talent as a baseball player on his college team made some teammates jealous, but could any of them have hated him enough to do this? The crisis brings all of Ben's relationships into sharp focus--and also leads Kate to unsettling revelations about her marriage. And with each discovery, Kate learns what happens when a single unforeseen event changes everything, and the future you've taken for granted is snatched away in a heartbeat. . . Praise for Rosalind Noonan's One September Morning "Reminiscent of Jodi Picoult's kind of tale. . .it's a keeper!" --Lisa Jackson, New York Times bestselling author "Written with great insight. . . Noonan delivers a fast-paced, character-driven tale with a touch of mystery." -- Publishers Weekly "Noonan creates a unique thriller. . .a novel that focuses on the toll war takes on returning soldiers and civilians whose loved ones won't be coming home." -- Booklist

Release date: September 1, 2010

Publisher: Kensington

Print pages: 512

Sample

Kate McGann Woodstock, New York

That night Kate McGann slid between the cool sheets of her bed, thinking of ways to escape her life. Her job, her daily routines, her ragtag marriage…the whole package cried out for an overhaul, a radical makeover, Pygmalia to Princess. She turned on her side, her body aching from planting the small pine trees in the yard that day. Heavy work, desperate work designed to exhaust her physically and keep the hillside around the house from eroding. Now, as she lay awake despite her exhaustion, she worried that her plan would fail on both counts.

She thought of those houses on television that were gutted, a new design rising on the same lot. If only you could employ architect, designer, and carpenter to remake a life. Her dark hair, now streaked with white, seemed mousey, the A-line cut far too cute for a woman of undetermined age. She wasn’t fat, not really, but the flesh on her petite frame had shifted and pooled in ways she didn’t want to face in the mirror. And her wardrobe, faded denim or khaki shorts with washed-out T-shirts, would qualify her for that other show, the one where the fashionistas wrest your favorite pair of jeans from your hands and toss them into a trash bin. Apparently, she’d spent too much of her free time this summer watching television, but movies, books, and even her survival gardening helped her avoid the task at hand, the challenge that probably faced every woman on the threshold of fifty.

Finding Kate.

It seemed to her that she was in need of one of those lyrical twists of fate, the proverbial lightning strike that blocks the familiar road with a felled tree and lights up a street you’ve never considered traveling. Her thoughts flowed to various pockets of possibility: a move to Baltimore to live with her sister, a tour with the Peace Corps that would take her to a small village in Africa or South America, a fellowship at some university that would allow her to do, well, something creative. Resident artist-gardener.

She tried to concoct the perfect fantasy, but each scenario had its thorns of trouble, tight vines that would inevitably choke off all possibility.

And why was that? she wondered as the full moon bled bold color through the stained-glass windows in her room. Her room now; her own personal space. It had been that way for almost a year, ever since she had dropped Ben off at college in Boston and returned to find Eli’s drawers emptied, his jeans and sweaters and T-shirts piled into boxes in the guest room. It had happened so quickly, or at least it seemed that way at the time. Strange how Eli, a passive-aggressive person, had stepped up and taken action on the one thing she’d hoped was negotiable.

The vacuous disintegration of their relationship was unlike her parents’ divorce, which had been a hot, passionate drama. Funny, but she still remembered that terrible scene some forty years ago. Although at the time she was just a kid in second grade, she remembered the loud argument of that momentous night. Voices quivered in rage, and profanity was flying, lots of “bad words,” some of which she’d never heard before. Her father turned up “Moon River” on the hi-fi so that no one could hear the arguments, but Kate moved to the top of the stairs where, peering through the balusters, she caught the words, flying like shards of glass.

“That woman,” her mother kept saying. “Moon River” was punctuated by smashing glass and sobs before the needle ripped across the record. That ended the song.

“Now you’ve done it.” Her father’s growl was low and deadly. Kate shrank behind the balustrade at the sight of his face, beet red with fury. A railing monster in her seven-year-old world.

Even now, nearly a decade after his death, that image of her father was branded in Kate’s memory. It seemed shameful, unfair to define a man by one bad moment, maybe one of the worst moments of his life, but Kate didn’t have a vast collection of memories to draw from, as he had packed a suitcase the next day and withdrawn from Kate’s life. Although she’d seen him many times after that night, his visits with Kate and her sister Erin well staged and sweetened with little gifts, their relationship was always distant, two people reaching across a fence, their arms straining, the connection only halfhearted.

Yes, her parents’ divorce had been explosive and quick, so different from the slow, torturous fizzle she’d been going through with Eli, who said there was no reason for divorce. He liked things the way they were, status quo.

Methodical, infuriating Eli.

Kate punched her pillow and flopped over in bed.

When she finally found sleep it was the restless variety; the purgatory of sleep where fitful dreams have you kick or cry out for the turmoil to end.

Night was still wrapped in itself when the bleating phone sliced into Kate’s subconscious.

The noise split the night, a clear division between life as she has known it and uncertain jeopardy on thin ice.

Instinctively she turned toward the digital clock on the nightstand, her eyes straining to focus in the dark. Just after four a.m. Who would be calling in the middle of the night?

Maybe a wrong number…or something important. Eli calling from the sheriff’s office, or Ben out of gas.

Pushing up from the mattress, she stretched to reach the phone, snatched it from the charger. It took her a few seconds to find the right button, her mind racing even as her body lagged.

“Hello?” A jagged vein of sleep ran through her voice.

“I’m calling from Cross College in Syracuse, trying to reach the parents of Benjamin McGann.”

No one called her son Benjamin. Only strangers. She threw off the sheets and slid out of bed.

“Who is this?” Kate raked back her hair and paced to the wall of windows as the man gave his name, said he worked security at the school, and that he needed to speak to one of Ben’s parents.

Moonlight fired the colored glass, slanting colored patterns on the fabric of the chaise. Blue and green diamonds. Eerie light. The stained glass seemed inordinately bright, but then she remembered there was a full moon tonight.

“I’m Kate McGann…his mother.” Her rapid heartbeat punctuated the momentary pause.

“Mrs. McGann, your son was injured in the dormitory. He just left here by ambulance, and I suggest you meet him in the Emergency Room at Good Samaritan Hospital.”

“Yes, yes. Of course.” The wood floor felt cold and grainy under her bare feet as she opened her bedroom door and headed down the hall, past Ben’s old room, which had remained intact since he left for college. Her heart pinged in her chest as she raced through the open living area. It wasn’t until she flew into the guest room and approached the couch that she realized where she had been running: to Eli, her husband.

Thank God he was there. A blanket sloped over his back, his face pressed into the pillow, he was lost in sleep.

“Eli, wake up.” Her voice quavered as she held the phone to her chest. “Something happened to Ben. He’s in the hospital.”

She felt him come awake even before his arm swept the blanket away and he sat up. “What happened?”

“I…I don’t know.” She asked the man on the phone, “What happened to him?”

“I’m sorry, Mrs. McGann, but I don’t have the details.”

“But he’s okay? I mean…” She closed her eyes, searching for the reassurance that would allow her to shake loose from this thorny panic. “He’s going to be okay, right?”

The silence on the line was like a weight dropped on her spirit.

Panicked, Kate scurried back across the house, back to her room to get dressed and go—fly!—to her son’s side.

“You’ll want to talk to the doctors at Good Samaritan,” the voice on the phone said.

“Good Samaritan,” she repeated, finding it difficult to hear him over the roar of her heartbeat. “Yes, yes, we’re on our way.”

As she crossed the dining room her gaze fixed on the circular stained-glass window in the living room, Eli’s masterpiece. It was a mandala, Sanskrit for “essence,” and the intricately designed circle was said to contain a primal pattern, this one colored to reflect Eli’s past, present, and future. Moonlight fired its panels of pearlized and colored glass, brilliant triangles of orange, inlaid amber, and brown surrounding crescents of ruby-red glass. Although she had passed that window a thousand times, never before had she seen moonlight strike the glass so that it resembled a crimson heart, engulfed in flames, aglow with anguish.

An illumination of the terror swelling in Kate’s chest as she darted down to the hallway to dress and go after her son.

Dr. Theodora (“Teddy”) Zanth Good Samaritan Hospital

So much blood…

When the doors flew open to reveal paramedics wheeling in a man strapped to a backboard, the blood was all Teddy could see. Red and clotted, it covered the man’s entire head, which looked sticky and slick.

Teddy let her eyes shift back to the entrance to keep from gaping at the patient. She wished she could escape to the cool night beyond those doors, but she was held in place by subtle reminders: the button-down smock hanging loosely around her, the stethoscope around her neck, and the ID card that read, as of yesterday, “Dr. Theodora Zanth, Good Samaritan.” She was a resident now, a doctor. Before someone on the trauma team at Good Sammy smelled her fear, she had better step up and take charge.

Especially with interns like Max Sanchez around. Teddy had been here little more than a week, but she already had a solid handle on the players in Good Sammy’s ER. What she lacked in medical savvy she more than made up for in observation skills, and her powers of observation indicated that Max Sanchez was a risk taker, a self-promoter, and a bully. Not very endearing qualities in Teddy’s book. If Max didn’t have those dark, exotic good looks going for him, he surely would have been bumped off by the nursing staff in his first year.

“Bay three is open,” Goldy shouted as she pointed behind her, grabbed the gurney, and tugged it her way. Goldy had probably prepared bay three when they got the call that the male trauma patient was in transit from a dorm at the college. Nurse Tonya Goldman was almost psychic in her anticipation of the next step of trauma medicine. Teddy suspected that Goldy could run this place single-handedly if the doctors would let her.

“What do we have?” Teddy asked.

“Head trauma. GCS is two-two-five.” The petite female paramedic had to shout to be heard over a beeping monitor and an argument in the waiting room between two intoxicated men. “The guy who found him said that he was talking, but we haven’t gotten a verbal response. Sounds like someone came at him with a baseball bat.”

Teddy processed the information as she hurried alongside the gurney. “GCS” stood for the patient’s Glasgow Coma Scale, a standard assessment of how the trauma had affected his consciousness. The GCS measured response to stimuli, such as whether the patient could close or open his eyes on command or respond to questions. Two-two-five meant nine out of fifteen; not so good. This guy had suffered a major injury. His verbal responses were poor, though he was still responding to physical stimuli.

“What’s his name?” Teddy asked.

“Ben. Benjamin McGann. Nineteen years old,” the female paramedic answered. “He’s at Cross College for the summer. Plays for the Lakers.”

“Ben, can you hear me? Do you know where you are?” He was unresponsive as the trauma team hustled him down the hall. His left eye was swollen, the skin bruised blue. “Let’s get a CT scan,” Teddy said, wanting pictures of his neck before she took him off the backboard and removed the collar.

Glancing up, she saw Dr. Chong, the ER attending physician, catch up with the moving gurney. Cold and reserved, Dr. Chong had a schoolmarmish approach to overseeing her staff that rattled Teddy’s nerves. “Go ahead,” Chong said with a quick nod, indicating that Teddy was to run the procedures.

Teddy’s heartbeat quickened as they pulled the gurney into the bay and one of the paramedics locked the wheels. For the first time in her career since she’d walked across the stage and been given the name of “Doctor” at med school graduation, she was the lead doctor calling the shots. It was scary.

“Cross match! Let’s get two units O negative in here,” Teddy called. Although his blood pressure was in the normal range, they would replace some of the blood he’d lost, just to be on the safe side. While they worked, the lab would match his blood type; in the meantime, he would receive two units of O negative, the blood type that was compatible with all blood.

“Any other tests, Dr. Zanth?” Chong prodded.

“Get me a CBC, coag panel, Chem seven, and a tox screen,” Teddy ordered. She interpreted Dr. Chong’s silence to mean that these were the right tests. The CBC would measure the red and white blood cells and the platelets in the blood. The coag panel would test his blood’s ability to clot, the Chem 7 would record seven aspects of the blood chemistry, and the tox screen would test for alcohol and drugs in his blood.

Teddy helped Goldy and the paramedics lift the patient and backboard onto the bed, then the organized chaos began. First the portable CT scan. Then Goldy took vital signs while another nurse, a guy they called Welch, started cutting off his clothes. Goldy inserted an intravenous line in his right arm. Welch started a Foley catheter. The paramedic was still pumping oxygen from a bag mask.

Members of the trauma team were well versed in their duties.

Teddy was the rookie here.

What’s next, what’s next? Each second was loaded with decisions, jam-packed with activity. Panic teased the edge of her confidence, but she tamped it down and gloved up.

Primary survey. She needed to stabilize any immediately life-threatening injuries. First things first: ABC. Airway, Breathing, Circulation. “How’s his breathing?”

The paramedic squeezing the bellows of the bag mask shook his head. “He’s struggling.”

“You’ll have to do an emergency trache,” Max offered. “With his facial injuries, his airways will be compromised. We need a trache kit,” he ordered, stepping on Teddy’s toes.

Max was going to drive her crazy. “I’ve got it,” Teddy told the intern, looking over to the computer monitor behind her. “Results of the CT scan?”

“He’s clear,” said the radiologist, a young, bearded man Teddy had never met.

“Okay, then.” Teddy removed the c-collar and examined the patient’s neck for soft tissue or ligament injury that wouldn’t show up in a picture. So far so good. She leaned over to assess the patient, his face tinged red from dried blood. Not a man, but a boy. A kid. A laceration near the patient’s left eye oozed fresh blood into a coagulating black scab. His breaths were shallow and rapid.

“Let’s move him off the backboard,” she ordered. “In three, two, one.” Together the staff lifted and shifted the patient onto a gurney.

Airways, airways! a voice in her head prodded Teddy. A sensor clipped onto his finger measured his oxygen level at 88 percent. Normally a person’s 02 stat measures 95 percent or better. “Oxygenation is not good,” Teddy said.

“And it’s falling. Don’t waste your time and his,” Max advised. “Order a trache kit and tube him. Do it now.”

“I’ll be calling the shots, Max.” Teddy tried to sound authoritative but knew her agitation was slipping through. She didn’t want to look to Dr. Chong for advice, felt sure the attending would cut in if Teddy chose the wrong thing, but she sure as hell didn’t need a med student like Max shouting orders.

Besides, right now a trache was the last thing she wanted to do. Panic sizzled under her skin at the thought of performing a tracheotomy, an incision into the neck to insert a breathing tube into the trachea. It was surgery, damn it, and she’d learned from her surgical rotation that she had not been gifted with the “beautiful hands” her mother possessed.

“Let me take a look,” Teddy said.

“Dr. Chong, you’re needed at curtain two,” someone called, but Teddy didn’t acknowledge the interruption. She needed to focus on the patient, filter out the unnecessary.

The paramedic pumping the ambu-bag removed the breathing device, and Teddy opened the patient’s mouth, her purple-gloved hands floundering on his chin for a moment before she reached into his mouth. “No foreign object blocking his airway.” The bag mask went back on his mouth as she placed her stethoscope on his chest, checking both sides. “Good breath sounds. No sign of lung collapse,” she reported.

Could she intubate? It would be difficult if there was blood or swelling in the throat. She looked for Dr. Chong, then remembered that the supervisor had been called away. Damn.

“I don’t think the airways are compromised.” Teddy held out one hand for the laryngoscope, announcing, “We’ll intubate.”

Although she felt Max’s disapproval, he kept quiet as she positioned herself behind the patient and gripped the cold metal tool with her left hand. Trying not to think, she took a deep breath and inserted the curved hook of the laryngoscope into the mouth, past the larynx. Forty-five degrees and lift. She looked for the vocal cords, but she couldn’t see a thing.

“We’ll need to suction him,” she said.

Welch handed her the tube, and she extracted maybe a half pint of blood.

“Blood oxygen is dropping,” Max warned. “He’s down to seventy-five percent.”

Dangerously low.

Teddy wasn’t sure if she should remove the scope and bag him for a bit, or proceed. He needed oxygen soon, but if she removed and reinserted the laryngoscope, all the poking and probing could cause swelling, making it impossible to establish an airway.

“You’re out of time,” Max said.

He was right. Well, maybe exaggerating a bit. What to do?

She peered in the patient’s throat, and this time the tiny light on the laryngoscope revealed the vocal cords, situated like two fleshy flaps at the trachea entrance.

“I’m in.” She reached for the plastic tubing and quickly fed it through the device, just enough tubing so that the cuffing tube would seal off securely at the larynx. She removed the laryngoscope.

There. “Inflate the cuff,” she ordered.

All this in seconds, her heart thumping in her ears.

Goldy responded as Teddy listened for breathing sounds in the lungs and stomach.

“Breathe,” Goldy said sternly.

With a smile worthy of a toothpaste ad, Max folded his arms. “You don’t have to worry about that; he’s intubated.”

After hearing strong breath sounds in both lungs, Teddy lifted her chin and met Goldy’s stern gaze as the woman repeated, “Breathe.”

Teddy took in a welcome breath, realizing that Goldy had been talking to her. She had been holding her breath, but she had made it through the procedure, her first successful intubation. For most interns it wouldn’t have been such a big deal, but for Teddy, it felt hopeful.

Baby steps.

Greg Cody Cross College

As he stopped for a red light at the edge of campus, Greg Cody had to wonder what the hell he was doing. There were no other cars in sight. Why not blow the light to get to his crime scene, or at least ease through it?

He rolled down the window, hitched his hand on the car roof, and reconsidered. Nah. It was the stolen hour, that time after the drunks have gone to bed and before the joggers are out, and he didn’t mind soaking it all in for just a moment.

The smell of grass and cool night reminded him of how far he’d come in the last year—264 miles, to be exact—from the only home he’d ever known. New York City to the smaller city of Syracuse.

Big difference.

Different culture, different weather. Different smell on a summer night, he thought wryly as he recalled the choking odor of the well-baked subway platform at Times Square in July. Now that was something you definitely did not want to soak up at two in the morning.

Not to put the Big Apple down. Some nights he longed for the crazy pace and the noise. He missed taking his daughter to dinner, missed late nights hanging out with friends from the job at Donovan’s or First Edition. Right now he’d kill for real bagels and pizza. He missed sitting in cheap seats at a Mets game—never gonna happen again, now that they had the new stadium. He missed taking mass transit to work when it snowed, which it did a lot here in Syracuse. A lot. One of the cops who grew up here talked about sewing Halloween costumes that would fit over her kids’ snowsuits. Snow in October, and they said New Yorkers were crazy.

From what he’d seen in the last year, Syracuse was a different kind of crazy, but his brother Joe had warned him about that. Joey was a cop, too, NYPD, though he was younger than Greg and still a ways from retirement. Always the Yoda of the family, Joe had warned Greg not to think that law enforcement would be any sweeter in Syracuse. “People are people everywhere,” Joey had said. “You got good ones and bad ones. Just not so many of them in Syracuse, I guess.” In the year that he’d been here, he’d learned that Joe was right. Syracuse’s culture was different from New York City’s, but the public, the perps, the jobs…they were about the same.

He’d left NYPD on a dare of sorts. Got sick and tired of hearing that he would never summon the nerve to leave the job. “You old-timers are all alike,” a young buck named Filch had razzed him one night in the precinct locker room. “You just can’t let go. Give it up, Gramps. You got gray hair.”

Cody had raked back his short-cropped silver hair, thick hair that still grew like a weed. “Better to have snow on the roof than a hole in the roof.”

“D’oh!” One of the other cops laughed, pointing at Filch, whose shiny pate gleamed in the fluorescent light. “You’ve been served!”

Filch’s jaw hardened. “Yeah, well, I can handle myself out there.”

Greg Cody sucked in a breath through his teeth. “I may be pushing fifty, but I can still do the job.”

“Yeah, yeah. You’ll be fat and bald and still tracking down perps when you’re ninety,” Filch warned. “They’ll have to carry you out of here in a pine box.”

Even after the kid had slammed his locker and left, Greg had been unable to shake the feeling that the kid was right. He was a hamster on a wheel, same old, same old. Nothing new, nothing to learn, nothing to look forward to.

The next day Greg had put in his retirement papers and started filling out online applications to other police departments, figuring that a change of venue would do him good. He’d been smarting from the divorce, still feeling like so much of New York was defined by the man he’d been with Carol as a wife. Their first apartment, their first house. The buildings she’d worked in at Rockefeller Center and down on Water Street. The Police Academy down on East 29th. The hospital where their daughter had been born. And the precincts—each place Greg had been assigned, Manhattan, Queens, and the Bronx—each had its own tilt, a distinct character. He’d loved that city—still did—but everywhere he looked he saw reminders of how his life had gone sour.

Enough already. He had to get out.

A month or so later Syracuse called, he answered, and long story short, here he was a year later, detective on the rotating shifts.

Greg Cody liked Syracuse because it was a smaller department. Smaller, not small, with nearly five hundred uniformed cops. He’d come here hoping to make a difference, to feel the difference he was making, though the jury was still out on that verdict.

Hawthorne Hall was easy to find; it was lit up like a Christmas tree. The four-story building had been constructed in that unfortunate era when brick and glass cubes were thought to be the design of the future. The poplar-lined circular drive in front was now blocked by a fire truck and a handful of police cars, their flashing lights mesmerizing in the cool night. Cody pulled his unmarked unit into a parking space, wondering at the way law enforcement types loved to pull up at skewed angles on curbs and sidewalks. Aside from the first vehicles on the scene, there was no need for it.

He passed a few students, one of them barefoot and curled into a jacket, who had engaged the firefighters in conversation. Good thing it’s summer session, he thought as he passed into the lobby of the dormitory. When he’d been on campus in April to investigate a date rape the place had been swarming with students.

The two square seating areas at the front of the lobby were overcome with sleepy students in pajamas and hoodies and fluffy slippers. Here and there some of the students gave statements or spoke with officers; others huddled in groups, talking quietly. Someone let out a laugh, and he scowled. This was not a sleepover.

Toward the rear of the lobby was a security desk and two turnstiles, the modern ones with retractable arms that whooshed open when you scanned your ID card. Impressive. Cody approached the desk and recognized Mal Rosenberg, another NYPD exile. “Sarge. Looks like you caught a crime scene. What you got?”

“Baseball player, summer league, one of our very own Syracuse Lakers. Injured in an assault. Kid goes to bed, next thing you know another player finds him bleeding on the bed, bloody baseball bat beside him. Looks like someone whacked him good.”

Greg took out his notebook. “Who found the victim?”

“Kid named Gibbs. Isaiah Gibbs. Said McGann was moaning, even talking to him. He’s really spooked.” Mal nodded toward the staircase. “He’s talking with one of the uniforms upstairs.”

Greg scanned the room, glared at two girls giggling in the corner. “Sounds like one of my daughter’s sleepover parties.”

“Yeah, once the residents saw the flashing lights they scrambled down to get a peek. Can’t blame them for being curious.” Mal scratched at the graying hair behind his ears. He was losing it on top, but the fringe of curls around the side, coupled with his reading glasses, gave him a professorial aura, which fit well here on campus.

“You put the campus in lockdown?” Greg asked.

“Nah. This is the first incident of its kind, appears to be someone the kid knew. Devin Mains, director of campus security, is on his way here. I’ll take care of coordinating the incident impact with him.”

“Who’s living in this building right now?” Cody asked.

“Summer school students and all of the guys on the team. It’s mandatory if they want to play. Supposed to be a bonding experience.”

“Did you ID the victim?”

Mal unclipped a BlackBerry from his belt and tapped his fingers on the screen. “Benjamin McGann, nineteen. Student at Boston College. Parents are on their way from Woodstock, New York.”

Cody took out his notebook and jotted down the name. He was a paper and pen man, trained by the NYPD with carbon copy reports and too old to change now. “No kidding? Like the rock concert?”

“Unless there’s another Woodstock.”

“Next of kin notified?”

“Security guard here at the college made the call, 3:22 a.m.,” Mal read aloud from the screen of his device. “Victim’s parents, Kate and Eli McGann. They’re on their way to meet him at Good Sam.”

“Are your technicians here yet?”

“They’re upstairs, sweeping the scene as we speak. There was a lot of blood, but then head wounds tend to bleed a lot. No obvious fingerprints or shoe prints.” Mal poked at the screen of his BlackBerry again and turned it toward Greg. “Photos of the scene.”

Greg took a look, nodding as Mal narrated and switched to the next picture. “Most of the blood was on the bed. Looks like the victim was either sitting or fell back onto the bed when he was attacked. Which could be lucky for him, seeing as the dorm has a linoleum floor.”

“You take those photos yourself?” Greg asked.

Mal nodded. “Sure. This thing is like a portable office. I’d be lost without it.”

“Not me.” Greg extracted his cell phone from his pocket and grimaced. “Personally, I’d like to toss it into the Hudson.”

“The Hudson? Now that’d be quite a toss from here. You’re one of Syracuse’s Finest now, Cody. Try tossing it in the lake.”

“Either way, it’s one more way for the department to reel you in. One more way for the ex to nag.”

“One way for your kids to reach out when they need you.”

“Yeah, maybe,” Cody admitted, thinking that Jessica had texted him twice since they’d returned from Florida last week, and yes, it had actually been sort of cool to read messages from his daughter on the phone. All those years of school, at least she’d learned to write. Come September she’d be a high school senior, but it had to be hard for her when he and Carol had split up when she was just starting high school. He scowled at his phone. “I don’t even know if this thing has a camera.”

Mal flipped open Greg’s phone and laughed. “You kidding me, Cody? How long you had this dinosaur?”

“It works.”

He handed it back. “Do yourself a favor. Step into your Verizon store and step into the twenty-first century.”

Tucking his phone away, Greg waved his small notebook. “Everything I need, I got right here, and I can still read it when the battery dies.”

Mal grinned, his dark eyes twinkling behind his reading glasses. “Yeah, well, you’ll be wanting to haul that dinosaur upstairs to the fourth floor. Only one elevator in this building, need the staff key to use it. When I wanted to go up, the paramedics had it tied up. Pain in the balls on a summer night.”

Greg glanced toward the open staircase at the back of the lobby. “Had a feeling about that. Looks like I’ll be getting my aerobic workout early today. Hey, have you seen a floor plan of the building?”

“Talk to Marcus, there,” Rosenberg said, pointing to the uniformed campus security guard. “He’s got some behind the desk.”

“And where will I find this Isaiah Gibbs, the kid who found the victim?” Cody wanted to talk to the guy while the details were still crisp in his memory.

“Fourth-floor lounge. Every floor has a sitting area, just across from the stairwell.”

Cody nodded, headed toward the stairs. “You say Gibbs is on the team? What position does he play?”

“Hell if I know. I gave up baseball when the Dodgers left Brooklyn.”

Greg Cody shook his head. “You’re too young to remember that.”

Rosenberg was already sliding a finger over his BlackBerry screen. “Don’t flatter me.”

“Catch you later, Mal.”

Mal Rosenberg nodded. “Later.”

Kate New York State Thruway

It took three calls to Good Samaritan Hospital to extract the sparse news.

“I’m sorry, but we don’t release patient information over the phone,” was the first response. Kate had argued, cajoled, and redialed twice to negotiate a release of precious information.

The voice on the phone seemed harried and reluctant. “I’m not supposed to say anything over the phone. Liability and everything,” said the woman from Good Samaritan’s ER unit, “but seeing that this is the third time you called and you’re down in the paperwork as next of kin, I’m thinking I might just tell you how it’s listed on the board?”

“Yes, please,” Kate said, desperate for a nugget of information.

“Head trauma.”

The words stole the air from her lungs. Kate hunched forward, grateful for the distance of the phone, the anonymity of darkness in Eli’s car.

This was serious. Ben was hurt.

Head injury.

Kate mulled over the possibilities. Now that they’d ruled out a car crash, she could fantasize that it was just a minor injury. Some minor bump or bruise, as Eli kept purporting.

“Head trauma,” Kate relayed to Eli, unable to look up at him as she sought to process the information and get more. She wanted some reassurance, some casual comment that would help her believe everything would be fine in the end. Unfortunately, the young woman told her she would have to talk to one of the doctors to get more information. “And they’re all busy right now.”

She could not imagine it, did not want to picture it. Being a fifth-grade teacher, Kate was not well versed in advanced anatomy, and she didn’t want to go there.

Eli moved his right hand from the stick to the stubby growth on his chin. “How does a nineteen-year-old guy hit his head in a college dorm room?”

Kate shook her head. “He’s always been so healthy. Never a broken bone. No surgeries.” While other moms sweated through ear tubes and tonsillectomies, Kate had counted herself lucky that Ben always got the thumbs-up from Dr. Palmer, his pediatrician.

She pushed panic away, forced herself to stay positive. Ben was physically strong, in perfect shape. Wouldn’t that help him heal quickly?

Kate knew the obvious scenario would involve drugs or alcohol, but she didn’t think that was likely with her son. Ben had always been appalled by professional baseball players who tested positive for drug use, disappointed when the big stars like A-Rod and Barry Bonds were connected to steroids. When Ben emerged as a strong, skilled athlete in high school, he took the initiative to develop healthy habits, eating the right foods, exercising, and training. When other parents worried about their kids experimenting with drugs and alcohol, Kate had confidence in Ben, who was determined not to let anything get in the way of his success in baseball. “I’ve been at parties where there’s beer,” he had admitted to her once when he was a junior in high school. “It’s not my thing and people are okay with that. Everyone knows that Dylan and I are just baseball nerds.”

Dylan and Ben…they’d been inseparable as kids. People had joked that Dylan was her second son. At times, Kate sensed him veering off track and she’d pulled him back in line, as a mother would. There was that time Dylan had too much to drink, and Ben brought him to their house to sleep it off in the guest room. Having known Dylan since he was a gap-toothed second grader, Kate let him crash there, but greeted him the next morning with tea and toast and a firm parental lecture.

“Thanks, Mommyson Two,” Dylan always told her with a big bear hug.

Having just his grandmother at home, Dylan often joked about being adopted into the McGann clan, and there was truth in comedy. In many ways, he was Kate’s second son, and Ben was the older brother, modeling good behavior for Dyl.

“Hey, man, your body is your temple,” Ben had told Dylan one day. Kate overheard them talking about trying a caffeinated energy drink to give them a boost before the game. “You’re going to pour in that garbage?”

Dylan…he would know what was going on.

She slipped her cell phone out of her purse and went to the phone directory.

“Calling the hospital again?” Eli asked.

“Dylan. I’m sure he’s on top of things. Maybe he’s with Ben right now. He can give us a better picture of what’s happening.”

But the line kept ringing. When his voice mail clicked on, Kate ended the call.

“No answer,” she said.

Eli tugged on his beard.

“Maybe he fell in the shower,” Kate said absently, desperate to fill in the blanks. “Or tripped on the stairs.”

“Kate, he’s nineteen, not ninety.”

“Maybe he got into a fight.”

“Our Ben?” Eli was skeptical. “Mr. Diplomacy?”

“I know, he’s not an instigator, but things happen. Sometimes guys just get dragged in.” Kate had seen it happen at school.

“You know, we’re probably overreacting.” Eli drove with one hand on the wheel, the other on the stick shift that he’d covered with black duct tape when the original knob broke off. “We’ll get there and he’ll con us into taking him to lunch. We’ll have to buy half a dozen burgers for Ben and Dylan.”

“That would be great.” But I doubt it. The leaden feeling in Kate’s stomach would not allow her to indulge in that fantasy. Somehow her body knew the seriousness of the situation. A mother knew these things. She just knew.

Their car sped along the interstate moving in sync with two other vehicles far ahead, seen only by the red disks of their taillights. “Red candy lights,” Ben used to call them when he was seven or eight. Once, while their car floated through the night in a traffic jam, he’d talked about reaching out the window to snatch up the red candy lights and eat them. Cherry lights, he’d said. Sometimes strawberry or raspberry. Never mint or cinnamon, which he hated.

Kate pressed a fist to her mouth to staunch the tears that threatened. Although it seemed that they’d been on the road for an eternity, they’d barely made a dent in the three-hour drive to Syracuse.

Three hours. An eternity to wait and worry.

And to think that she’d been thrilled when Ben had landed in Syracuse for the summer. “So close!” she’d told him. “Dad and I will be able to drive up and catch some games.”

Eli’s ancient BMW smelled of oil and leaf mold. Needing some fresh air, Kate pressed the button to open the window. The glass did not move. She pressed it again.

“That one’s broken,” he explained. “I have to take a look at it.”

She marveled that the engine purred smoothly at seventy-five miles per hour on the interstate, but then Eli had always told her the engine was perfect. “It’s the rest of the car that’s falling apart,” he used to joke. Not such a funny joke to Kate, given that it was true.

A few years ago when they got a good-size tax return she had campaigned for Eli to buy a new car, but he had refused, horrified at the prospect of change. Eli did not cope well with change. And so, sixteen years after they had moved Upstate, he was still driving the same route to teach at the Woodlands Academy four days a week, still making the same patterns of stained glass in his studio each weekend. His short, dark beard was trimmed to the same length, and he probably would have kept the same hairstyle if hair were still growing on the top of his head. He found security in the routine of it, wrapped himself in the sameness of each day as if it were a blanket worn soft with familiarity.

There was a time when Kate felt that she was right beside him wrapped in the same blanket…but not anymore. Now, at a time when she needed some source of security, she was outside, looking in.

Suddenly she felt cold. She huddled into the gray hoodie she’d thrown on before they left the house.

Eli shot her a look. “I can turn the heat on.”

“That’s okay.” God knew what would fly out of the vents if he cranked the air on.

“You know, I question whether we did the right thing, letting him play summer league. He’s only nineteen, and it’s a lot to be on your own for the summer.”

Kate hugged herself. “He’s learned a lot this year, living on his own in Boston.”

“College is different.” He stroked the hairs on his chin, a sign that he was waxing philosophical. “There’s a modicum of security in collegiate life. You’ve got that safety net of professors and student life. Ben’s good at learning the limits and staying with the pack. But this summer ball…it’s such an odd program.”

“He’s playing with other college kids. He’s got Dylan on the same team. For God’s sake, he’s living on a college campus. It’s not like he’s juggling an apartment and a job somewhere.”

Eli shrugged. “Maybe it’s me. I guess I just don’t understand the politics and competitiveness of college athletics. I’ve always told you straight out that I don’t get baseball.”

You can say that again, Kate thought, though she restrained. . .