The Fence Part 7

"Ike, you guys really ought to wear jackets."

Thomas was thrown. Jackets? It was like a non sequitur. He'd just arrived and was quickly trying to take stock of all the activity and figure out who was hurt-and Daley was in his face animatedly insisting the gang unit's sartorial choices were lacking.

"I'm like, 'Okay, What are you talking about?'"

Daley could have given Thomas some context-told Thomas that for a few scary moments he'd had his handgun trained on Mike c.o.x, admitted he'd tried to arrest Mike. But Daley didn't do that. "You guys really ought to wear jackets because some people don't know who you are."

Thomas didn't have time for guessing games. He spotted Teahan and Ryan kneeling behind a cruiser and went over. That's when he saw Mike. From the vague radio transmissions, the sergeant had not gotten the sense an officer was badly injured. But Mike looked seriously hurt. Thomas asked Mike what happened. "He tried to talk," Thomas said later, "but he couldn't. Nothing was coming out." Richie Walker then came over and stood behind Thomas. Walker had himself just returned to the dead end. From his car, he'd run through the hole in the fence, banged up his knee after slipping, and then hustled after the suspect later identified as s.m.u.t Brown. He was the officer who retrieved Conley's flashlight. Walker asked how Mike was doing, but Thomas waved him off. The supervisor stood up and was asking out loud: What happened? What happened?

"We found him like this," said Ryan and Teahan.

Their response didn't answer the question.

Seconds later, Craig Jones was also hovering over his battered partner, a sight that took his breath away. From the point where he'd knocked down Tiny Evans on the left side of the cul-de-sac, Craig had run to the front of the cars and followed Richie Walker through the hole in the fence. "I a.s.sumed he was chasing somebody." Craig tripped going through the hole and slipped on the hill. Instead of joining the foot chase, he'd turned around and gone back to the dead end. He saw that Tiny, Marquis, and Boogie-Down were on the ground in handcuffs in front of the Lexus. To Craig, this was great news. Craig saw Dave Williams at the front of the Lexus. Excited by the successful climax to the long chase, Craig raised his hand and slapped Williams's-a congratulatory high-five between two towering black cops.

Craig had then noticed Tiny was yelling for him, squirming and trying to get to his knees. Craig went over and pushed Tiny down. He ordered Tiny to stay put. When Tiny didn't and said he needed to talk to him, Craig leaned down and punched him hard in the face. "He fell on the ground," Craig said. Tiny stayed put this time.

Craig was charged up. Cops and cruisers were everywhere, the sirens and lights a kind of sound and light show providing an exclamation point to the capture of shooting suspects. "My adrenaline was going." But the satisfied feeling was short-lived. Gary Ryan came over and told him, "Your partner is hurt." Craig followed Ryan to the rear of the cruiser. "Mike was a mess." The blood was all over Mike and splashed across the cruiser's trunk. The cuts, the bruises. Mike's head misshapen by the huge b.u.mp. "Never seen anything like it." Craig's soaring feelings had ended in a crash landing.

He knelt next to his partner. Mike seemed to respond to the familiar voice. In and out of consciousness, Mike finally made some sense on two fronts. One was professional: He began mumbling about the guns thrown from the Lexus, and seconds later the police radio crackled with his information. "The officer who is injured told me the suspects threw some weapons out on Itasca Street," reported one of the other officers standing there. The dispatcher asked for more details. "Uh, he's a little bit, uh, hurtin' right now," came the reply, followed by "He said two different locations."

Mike's second moment of clarity was personal: He asked Craig to call Kimberly. "He kind of moaned it," Craig said. Craig promised he would.

Craig and the others attending to Mike were growing impatient.

"Get an ambulance down here!" one of them yelled over the radio.

Seconds later: "What's the deal?"

"C'mon, hurry up!"

Hampered by the bottleneck of police vehicles, the paramedics arrived at 3:03 A.M. Sergeant Thomas watched as they worked furiously to stabilize Mike. "They were cutting his clothes off, taking his clothes off like it was a very, very serious injury," he said. "They were asking questions, like, 'Has he been shot?'"

Elsewhere, officers milled around, simultaneously checking on the three shooting suspects on the ground and curious about the damage done to Mike c.o.x. For their part, Dave Williams and Jimmy Burgio pretty much hung back ten to fifteen yards away in front of the Lexus. Williams, at one point, walked over to check on Mike, but Burgio stayed put. One thing on his mind was making sure he was going to get credit for an arrest. "You get written up for that, it looks great in your folder," he said later.

Mike was moved onto a stretcher. Thomas, the ranking officer, began making some decisions. He talked to Craig Jones about returning to Itasca Street to look for the handguns. He told Gary Ryan to ride in the ambulance with Mike, and he told Joe Teahan to follow in their car. He told them both to contact Mike's wife. He also made sure they took possession of Mike's equipment-standard operating procedure. Thomas got Mike's gun and handcuffs, but they couldn't find the radio Mike wore clipped to his belt.

Ryan and Teahan began looking around, a search that took Teahan down along the right side of Dave Williams's cruiser and past the pa.s.senger side where Jimmy Burgio rode. Teahan spotted Mike's radio on the ground in front of the cruiser by the fence. "It was kind of like in front of the car, but up like two o'clock," Teahan said.

No one was really paying attention to the significance of it, but the radio's location suggested that, following the first blows, Mike either fell or was pulled from where he'd initially stood at the fence to a spot near the front of the cruiser.

Thomas was not yet focused on the reality that he had a crime scene on his hands-the a.s.sault and battery of Boston police officer Michael c.o.x. Instead, he asked again Teahan and Ryan and other cops standing around, What happened? Did anyone see what happened? He got shrugs. He got silence. "I got no response," Thomas said.

Thomas might as well have been asking the meaning of life. No one broke rank to offer any information. Instead, an alternative explanation arose, originating in the circle around Mike and then working its way out, where cop after cop grabbed on to it like a raft in troubled waters. The story started with Teahan and Ryan, two fellow gang unit members. They began telling everyone Mike had slipped on a patch of ice. Even while insisting he had not seen anything, Teahan nevertheless was saying, "Michael had fallen and hit his head." He and Ryan hypothesized Mike had run from his cruiser and "hit the patch of ice and went flying."

Despite all the police training on the scene, despite the first impression of the paramedics, Donald Caisey, and others that Mike had been shot, the ice-slip theory quickly became gold. For those who'd beaten Mike or witnessed the attack, it provided cover for their crimes. For those who were not culpable but sensed trouble, it was a safe haven from having to consider wrongdoing by fellow cops. Mike's injuries were accidental-what could be simpler than that? The explanation was neutral and nonincriminating: textbook see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil. Even Craig initially went with the seductive but absurd concoction.

"I didn't want to believe what really happened, happened."

In denial or worse, Mike's coworkers launched the bogus story. That Sergeant Ike Thomas did not put the brakes on the rank speculation but instead allowed the smokescreen to gain traction was the first of a series of supervisory failures complicating right from the start any search for accountability.

"That's the only thing that I had to go on at that point in time," Thomas said later in self-defense, seeming to abandon altogether the most basic trait of any investigator: skepticism. Thomas even a.s.signed Donald Caisey the job of writing the report about Mike's injury, and Caisey, notwithstanding his own initial skepticism, went with the storyline of convenience: ice.

The reality was that, in addition to the Lexus and the capture of the shooting suspects, Sergeant Thomas and the others now had a second crime scene requiring clear-cut steps to secure and preserve evidence: taping off the area around the fallen Mike, the cruiser, and the fence; photographing all those areas; seizing flashlights, boots, and clothing of those officers first to arrive to test for trace evidence in the crime lab; notifying immediately the command staff and Internal Affairs; taking statements from the officers at Woodruff Way.

But rather than consider that Mike had been mistaken for a fleeing shooting suspect and beaten to a pulp, Thomas and others in charge steered clear, pursuing instead a kind of supervisory avoidance of the obvious.

"It seemed believable to me," Sergeant David C. Murphy said later about his embrace of the ice-slip theory. Murphy was the second sergeant to show up at Woodruff Way, while Mike was still on the ground and everyone was waiting for the ambulance's arrival. He was the patrol supervisor from the Mattapan station. The high-speed chase had cut across Mattapan and ended on his turf, involving a number of his officers, like Richie Walker. Murphy's job was to help Sergeant Thomas sort out the situation. He had parked his cruiser down on Mary Moore Beatty Way and walked up through the hole in the fence.

Murphy sized up the scene as having three parts that required supervision: the injured officer, the damaged police cruiser driven by Dave Williams, and the shooting suspects. He asked a few questions about Mike c.o.x and took at face value the speculation about a slip on ice. Not his problem-injuries to an officer were the worry of the officer's supervisor, Sergeant Thomas. Then there was the damaged cruiser-it was from the Dorchester district. Not his problem again-the vehicle was the worry of his counterpart from Dorchester, a sergeant named Daniel Dovidio. Murphy instructed Dave Williams to radio Dovidio and tell him to come to Woodruff Way.

Murphy then dealt with the three suspects and the Lexus. He oversaw arrangements for transporting Tiny, Marquis, and Boogie-Down to the Roxbury station house for booking, for photographing the Lexus, and for towing the car. s.m.u.t Brown had already been taken in a separate police wagon to the station. Murphy then listened to several officers, including Ian Daley, who wanted to talk up their roles in the arrests. "Everybody wanted a piece of this," Murphy said later. Murphy himself joined the unabashed maneuvering for glory. He later told police officials that down below on Mary Moore Beatty Way he'd helped capture s.m.u.t Brown-an embellishment completely at odds with the fact that Kenny Conley apprehended s.m.u.t Brown.

With a singular focus on the shooting suspects, Murphy walked around and began shooing cops away from the scene. "He started telling everybody to get the h.e.l.l out of there," said Bobby Dwan, who had reunited with Kenny Conley after Kenny's return to the dead end. Said Murphy, "There was a lot of people there who were just kind of milling around." Murphy also began spreading the canard about c.o.x-telling officers who asked about Mike's condition that he'd fallen and hit his head.

Inadvertently, or worse, Murphy was aiding and abetting the developing smokescreen hiding the true nature of Mike's injuries. He was clearing the dead end of officers who either were eyewitnesses to the beating or had picked up information about it. While paramedics loaded Mike into the ambulance, officers, instead of being ordered to doc.u.ment their actions, were told to disappear into the night.

By 3:15 A.M., the ambulance carrying Mike c.o.x slowly worked its way out of the dead end en route to Boston City Hospital about six miles away. Many officers, following Murphy's command, were pulling out. Craig Jones left to retrace his steps to search for the handguns. Richie Walker got into his cruiser to head back to the car he'd stopped near the Cortee's and then abandoned to join the chase. Kenny Conley and Bobby Dwan returned to their cruiser; by 3:30 A.M. they were gone. They headed first to the Roxbury police station. Kenny wanted to retrieve the handcuffs he'd used to complete the task Mike c.o.x had started-the capture of s.m.u.t Brown. From there, they continued driving through Roxbury back up to their sector in the city's South End, where the next call they took was about yet another "suspicious person" on Washington Street. They found a hooker standing alone in the cold and ordered her to move on.

While some left, plenty of police were still amid the chaos of Woodruff Way-Sergeants Ike Thomas and David Murphy, Donald Caisey from the gang unit, Ian Daley, and a slew of officers from Boston and other police agencies. TV news crews began appearing. Dave Williams and Jimmy Burgio climbed inside Williams's cruiser to await the arrival of Sergeant Dovidio, their patrol sergeant. To stay warm, they blasted the heater.

Dovidio, the third sergeant, then showed up; in short order, he trumped the supervisory mess already in play at Woodruff Way. His became the starkest display of disregard of duty. Dovidio was fifty-eight years old and nearing retirement. It was as if he wanted nothing to do with actual police work. Earlier, when the high-speed police chase went one way, Dovidio went the other. Even though several of his men, including Dave Williams and Jimmy Burgio, had responded to the shooting at Walaik.u.m's, Dovidio drove back to the station. He said he had some paperwork to do. Besides, he said later, he was not obligated to get involved in the chase. "It didn't originate on my district."

But Dovidio did have to leave his desk once Dave Williams radioed about the damaged cruiser. The sergeant was not happy. He pulled up behind the Lexus, marched to where Williams and Burgio sat in the cruiser, and wanted to know where Burgio's cruiser was. When they explained that Jimmy's was back at the station, Dovidio demanded to know what the h.e.l.l was going on. He began yelling about violating department procedures for teaming up without permission. Burgio tried to settle the sergeant down.

"What are you worried about? I just made a great arrest," he claimed.

Dovidio would have none of it. "The captain will have my a.s.s." Thinking it over, Dovidio quickly devised a solution: He told Williams and Burgio they had not been in the one cruiser; instead, Burgio had been in his own cruiser. That was how they were going to write up their reports: There was not one, but two cruisers from the Dorchester station. He even pointed to a spot in the cul-de-sac where Burgio should say his cruiser came to a halt. No matter that the deception would create all kinds of confusion for investigators later trying to map out the scene. Dovidio had come up with an expedient way out for all of them-one that came with his imprimatur to lie.

The message was clear: Protect one another. Dovidio wasn't done either. Despite the flood of police officers, the sergeant, rather than naming names, was planning to say the only officers at the dead end when he arrived at 3:15 were the two in his charge. It was a fiction that helped clear the stage and create running room for those wishing to be invisible. In a third move, Dovidio decided he was going to try to see that Dave Williams and Jimmy Burgio were honored for exemplary police work during the wildest police chase anyone in the department could remember.

Dovidio, all by himself, was the embodiment of the culture of silence and cover-up that was kicking into gear on Woodruff Way. But he was not alone. "Bottom line," Kenny Conley said later, "is that no one took responsibility for that crime scene.

"The patrol supervisor [Murphy] from Ba3 tried to say he caught the guy I cuffed...The anti-gang supervisor [Thomas] never really did what he was supposed to do. Lotta people lied that night. Believe me, Dovidio wasn't the only supervisor to neglect his duty."

After Mike's arrival at the hospital, while much of the city still slept, police were busy at two locations dealing with the chase's messy aftermath. The critical care unit at Boston City Hospital saw the comings and goings of some of Mike's coworkers, as they checked on Mike's condition and heard from doctors Mike had been hit with a "blunt object." No amount of wishful or deceitful thinking could turn an ice patch into the culprit.

Then there was the Roxbury district station, where the four shooting suspects were taken for processing and where a couple of dozen officers came and went as part of the post-chase debriefing. "There was a lot of activity in the station, a lot of people around," Craig Jones said. Given Lyle Jackson's numerous gunshot wounds, homicide detectives had joined the other officers who were congregating, either filing in from Walaik.u.m's, the chase's starting point, or Woodruff Way, the end point.

s.m.u.t Brown and his three friends were searched, fingerprinted, and handcuffed to the wall in the booking area on the first floor. s.m.u.t was the only one to give police his true name. The other three offered aliases they'd used before: Tiny Evans said his name was Anthony Wilson; his brother Marquis said he was Robert White; and Boogie-Down became Darryl Greene. In evidence bags, officers logged their beepers, cell phones, necklaces and rings, s.m.u.t's $795 and Tiny's $707.

s.m.u.t hadn't been able to talk to the others and still thought Marquis was the victim of the police beating. Marquis was indeed hurting, but his aches came from the hit he took from the skidding cruiser. He was complaining he needed medical attention for his legs. Boogie-Down also wanted to see a doctor. "My right side of my face was sc.r.a.ped and bruised. My right hand was bruised. My lower back was bruised and my legs were hurting." The two were taken by police escort to Brigham and Women's Hospital.

In the second-floor "guardroom" a core group of cops was seated at desks to begin the paperwork. It was work with two tracks: one focused on the chase and doling out credit for the four arrests, the other focused on Mike c.o.x's injuries. Ian Daley had gotten the job of authoring the official incident report about the chase, known as a 1.1, a reference to the department's standard Form 1.1, while Donald Caisey of the gang unit continued working on the 1.1 about Mike's injury.

Police reports are supposed to be objective, reliable, and detailed, but interest in those principles-interest in what truly happened at the dead end-seemed lost as the guardroom was transformed into a creative-writing seminar. Officers huddled for brief chats about their competing versions of events, sometimes leaving the room for private talks, all the while keeping an eye on how the reports were stacking up.

"Everybody was trying to add their little bit to the report-'I'm so and so, don't forget me.' Things like that," Craig Jones said. The process was neither orderly nor pretty. Flare-ups erupted. Craig and Ian Daley didn't hit it off, for example. Writing reports was ordinarily an anathema, and Craig was put off that Daley was adamant about being in charge. He suspected that Daley saw being the writer as a way to control the narrative to say he made one of the arrests. "I felt like he wanted the glory," Craig said.

But the others weren't about to let that happen. Craig maintained he'd arrested the driver. The towering Dave Williams then claimed he and Jimmy Burgio arrested the two suspects in front of the Lexus. Burgio even showed up at the station briefly to reinforce the point. "It was my arrest," he said. "I wanted it." Richie Walker then claimed he arrested the fourth suspect, s.m.u.t Brown. He acknowledged that another cop was there, but he didn't know who-a "tall, white cop" was the best he could do. Craig chimed in the description fit Gary Ryan of the gang unit, and that was that. The second cop became Gary Ryan. Mystery solved. No one bothered to call Ryan to learn this was all wrong.

Instead, an overwhelmed Daley dutifully jotted down notes-and, for the purposes of the report, not only was Kenny Conley suddenly Gary Ryan, but Richie Walker was the hero. "Officer Walker never losing sight of the suspect," wrote Daley, "ran through bushes and behind buildings and finally captured suspect." It was all part of the misleading mess that Daley typed up in his three-page narrative. He did get some measure of revenge against Craig Jones; he avoided giving Craig credit for arresting Tiny by not describing Tiny's apprehension. Otherwise, it was all there-the key inaccuracies that Richie Walker captured s.m.u.t Brown, and that Williams and Burgio had captured Marquis and Boogie-Down "after a brief foot chase." The part about the foot chase was yet another fabrication; after they were knocked to the ground, Marquis and Boogie-Down barely moved, except to wiggle out from under the cruiser.

But not every cop orbited the guardroom making sure Daley got his name spelled correctly. Some went back to work-like Kenny Conley and Bobby Dwan. Capturing s.m.u.t Brown was a career highlight for Kenny. He'd never nabbed a shooting suspect before. He was certainly as compet.i.tive as anyone and always gave it his all-fighting for a rebound under the hoop, for example. But his game was more about grunt than glory, whether on the court or on the job. He'd never gotten a medal. His personality was not about ego. "I'm not like that," he said. With s.m.u.t, Kenny saw himself as making an "a.s.sist." He and Bobby had helped out the guys from the Roxbury and Mattapan districts, and at the shift's end, that's what he and Bobby wrote down in their log at their station.

Jimmy Rattigan was another cop who eschewed the ego mud wrestling. He and his partner swung by the station after their release from the hospital. They went upstairs and walked into the guardroom and found everyone going at it. Said Rattigan: "They were saying, 'I cuffed him,' 'No, I cuffed him,' and they were like, 'Well, I'm gonna take this one, you're gonna take that one.'" He saw Ian Daley, Craig Jones, Dave Williams, and Jimmy Burgio. Rattigan was disgusted. "I thought to myself, there's Mike c.o.x sitting in the hospital and these guys are arguing over who's gonna take an arrest. Me and Mark, we were like, 'Can you believe this s.h.i.t?' and then we just left."

It wasn't as if they weren't talking at all about Mike. By dawn most everybody in the guardroom was aware the ice story was bogus. "When people were coming up to the guardroom," said Ian Daley, "they were basically saying who was the police officer that got, you know, beat up?" Said Richie Walker: "That was the topic of the conversation."

The talk, however, mostly circled around the beating instead of focusing on what actually happened-who did what and who saw what. There were moments, however-fleeting moments-where key cops, still in the heat of the night's events, made comments that started down the road of truth. Ian Daley was one who began heading in this direction. He pulled Donald Caisey aside at one point and told him he knew cops had beaten Mike c.o.x. Caisey, taken aback, pressed Daley for more information. What are you saying? he asked. "Cops did this to Mike," Daley said. Caisey said, Okay, who? Daley did not answer. That was as far as he'd go.

It was as if a paralysis had spread like a virus once everyone realized cops had beaten a cop. The ground was unfamiliar to them-a coworker, a brother, had turned out to be the victim of police brutality, and some cop or cops at the station had either committed the a.s.sault or witnessed it. Had a suspect been beaten-well, that was not so otherworldly. Many cops had seen or been part of an altercation where the bad guys got roughed up and sometimes worse. This, however, was not the more typical us-versus-them dynamic that lent itself to sticking together to gloss over the use of excessive force. This was radioactive, a beating that was turbo-charged with a complicated set of competing loyalties-to the individual person, to race, to the code of silence, and to justice.

Daley was apparently not sure what to say or what to do. He was tongue-tied, but he also wasn't alone in "showing leg," or offering a hint of information of evidentiary value. Jimmy Burgio, down in the first-floor lobby, walked over to another one of the gang unit officers and said, "I think one of your guys got beat up by mistake." But, as with Daley, no one followed up in earnest, and Burgio said no more. It became another potential lead lost in the paralysis. Then the most tantalizing tidbit came from Dave Williams. Outside the guardroom, he caught up to Craig Jones walking down the hallway.

"I think my partner hit your partner by accident," he said.

Craig stopped. His investigatory gears kicked in. He pictured Mike's bloodied head on the pavement. Where's Burgio's flashlight? he asked. Williams said Burgio probably had it with him. Where's Burgio? Craig then asked. He's gone, Williams said.

Burgio had already left the station, and no one went after him. No one got the flashlight. Burgio was "8-boy," police radio code for "nowhere to be found."

The answers were right there in the guardroom. But no one came clean-and no one took charge and insisted upon it. No one called a time-out on all the bobbing and weaving to demand better. No one pounced on the leads-the incriminating and suggestive statements that in the light of the next day, and in the days that followed, began to be taken back, spun differently, or flat-out denied. The media were expecting police reports to continue its coverage about the hair-raising high-speed chase, portraying the arrests as a hugely successful police moment, and the few hints at the truth were choked off by a toxic blend of cop ego and cop cover-up. Mike's beating was a public relations disaster that would only steal a great headline about departmental heroics.

Sergeant Thomas allowed Donald Caisey's flawed injury report to go through-a minimalist composition of twelve handwritten lines in one ungrammatical paragraph: "Officer c.o.x lost is [sic] footing on a puddle of ice causing him [to] lose his balance and fall forward striking his head on a marked cruiser. Officer c.o.x then fell backward on the ground striking the back of his head on the ground. As a result of this Officer c.o.x sustained head injuries causing him to lose consciousness for a short period of time."

No mention was made of all the blood, of Mike's cuts on his mouth, the three-inch cut on his forehead and other facial cuts, the st.i.tches, the egg-sized hematoma, the bruising to his midsection, the hand and its torn ligament, the kidney damage. No mention was made of the truth everyone at the station knew by daybreak-Mike was beaten.

The result was this: an initial official record of the event that was false-a record that kept the story simple and singularly about police success and that postponed the negative about Mike. But the phony reports-mirroring Sergeant Dovidio's handiwork at the scene-were tantamount to a license to lie. Once the lies began, where would they end?

Lying in pain in one of the cubicles in the critical care unit, Mike had tried to be helpful when the doctors asked him about his injuries. "The doctor asked me a lot of times what happened to me, and I couldn't really tell him." He had been glad to see his wife when she arrived. He didn't expect his mother to come, but was not surprised she did. In his fog, he saw officers coming and going, but much of it was a blur. Sergeant Thomas, Donald Caisey-he recognized them. His partner, Craig, was there, and before the night was over, Craig's hand was put in a cast. It turned out he'd broken a finger either when he punched Tiny Evans or when he slipped on the hill. Mike heard Richie Walker in the room say he'd seen him running toward the fence after someone, and Walker's comments helped Mike remember for the first time he'd been involved in a foot chase toward the fence.

Most memorably, he heard Dave Williams come in and say, "I think cops did this." He'd heard his mother gasp, and his first reaction was to worry about her. "She began making statements like, 'Oh, G.o.d,' and I just remember wanting to have a conversation calming her down because it was bad enough. She hated the way I looked and thought that I was going to die right there. I just wanted to calm her down."

It was vintage Mike, worrying about what others were thinking.

Kimberly, meanwhile, was left speechless. She didn't know what to think, but soon enough she began smoldering inside. She kept returning her gaze to the large b.u.mp on Mike's head. "It was a huge ma.s.s," she said. To her, it was proof Mike had been hit hard. The idea made her furious: Mike had been attacked by other officers who'd crossed the line from reasonable to excessive force. They'd hit him and then run.

"They shouldn't have left him," she said.

Mike picked up on his wife's anger. But, of course, he was mostly in the dark, and his family was focused on his care, not getting to the bottom of his beating. The doctors wanted to admit him for further treatment. Kimberly had a different idea. She wanted to take Mike home. "I could watch him closer." By her calculation, her one-on-one care was better than, say, a ratio of one hospital nurse for every five patients. She was graduating in five months from medical school, and she'd done a rotation in neurology at the New England Medical Center. She was confident she knew what to look for.

"I just felt I could give him better care at home."

So while daylight spread over the city, Kimberly brought Mike home to the two-family house on Supple Street in Dorchester owned by one of Mike's sisters. The light outside bothered Mike and made him squint. Voices made him cringe. His head pounded. Walking unsteadily to the house, he felt the world spinning. He could not think straight.

His sons, Mike Jr. and Nick, were waiting, wondering why their parents weren't home when they awoke. "They really looked up to my husband," Kimberly said. The boys sometimes talked about growing up to be a police officer like their father. "He's this big guy," she said. "Daddy, you know, is invincible." The boys had never really seen their father sick or off his feet. "All of a sudden, he's been knocked down."

Nick, who had turned five earlier in the month, hung back while his father was helped into bed. Then he slowly walked into his parents' bedroom-and he froze. He turned and ran quickly from the sleeping giant-from the man who was supposed to be his father but whose misshapen and monstrous-looking face was unrecognizable.

Nearly a week pa.s.sed before Nick ventured back.

CHAPTER 10.

No Official Complaint Sometime during Mike's first night home he bolted up in bed. It was a sudden and nearly violent movement. Kimberly awakened immediately. She saw that Mike was soaked in his own sweat.

What's wrong? she asked.

Mike didn't respond. His shoulders shuddered, as if trying to hide something.

Then Kimberly heard: Mike was crying.

Mike? she said.

Mike wasn't sure what was going on. He felt frightened to the bone, a feeling that was crystal clear, even though he'd come home woozy from a combination of his injuries and the medications doctors had him taking-painkillers and antibiotics. Fear raced through his body like an electrical current, and he couldn't seem to get control of it.

Mike, Kimberly said. What's wrong?

When he first sat up it had all seemed so very real. But then he heard Kimberly's voice and began to realize where he was-in bed next to his wife. The house was quiet. He'd had a nightmare.

Kimberly asked about what. But Mike wouldn't say. More wakeful, he grew self-conscious about crying. Embarra.s.sment replaced the fear. The two emotions were foreign to a man known for his poise and courage.

What was it? Kimberly asked again.

Mike still wouldn't say. "He just didn't want to talk about it," she said.

The nightmare wasn't a one-time occurrence. It came back the next night and again most nights in the weeks to come. In it, men in blue uniforms were after him. They were Boston policemen; Mike recognized the uniforms. But he didn't know who they were; they were faceless. They invaded his house and were usually armed. They opened fire as they came toward him. Mike had his gun, but he was one against many.

Eventually Mike talked to Kimberly about the dreams. "The theme is usually the same," Kimberly said. "Our house is being stormed by several policemen with guns and he's shooting back. They're shooting and they're killing us."

Kimberly's commuting to Philadelphia for medical school had slowed down during her fourth year. She'd arranged to do her training in Boston area hospitals and was mostly home. The flexibility was fortuitous. Once Mike got hurt, she was able to stay with Mike to oversee his care and work on comforting the boys.

To protect Mike Jr. and Nick from the truth, she actually adopted the official explanation for his injuries. The next day she told them their father had banged his head after slipping on ice. Five-year-old Nick, in particular, was scared his father was going to die. She rea.s.sured him he was not. But Nick stayed frightened and easily upset. Kimberly found herself putting Nick to bed early and sitting with him until he fell asleep.

The boy's fright tore Mike up. "He wouldn't talk to me." Mike was bedridden and helpless to do much of anything his first week home. It was like he was trapped in a thick fog. He hated to move. The slightest turn caused the room to rock. "I couldn't get up quickly, or turn my head quickly," he said. "I would get dizzy and fall." The best chance to keep the world still was to move in slow motion. To go to the bathroom the morning he got home, he shuffled across the bedroom, and that's when he saw for himself what he'd overheard at the hospital: His urine was "very dark, dark, with strands of like red in it."

His mind was off speed too. He couldn't find the words to complete a sentence. He would start, and then the words seemed to slip through his fingers. When he wanted to call out to one of his sons, he couldn't. It was like his mind was stuttering.

"Just to remember my kids' names was, like, a struggle."

It was scary, and Mike was a wreck. Neither his body nor his mind felt like it belonged to him. Following an examination, a neurologist concluded that Mike had post-concussive syndrome and post-traumatic vestibular vertigo, medical-speak for what was causing his splitting headaches, dizziness, memory loss, and cognitive difficulties.