IN THE FALL OF 2000, MCCAIN INVESTIGATIONS was churning along with a steady flow of business. Most of its employees were in the field and making out reports, permitting the agency to bill a fair number of hours, and more and more big Joe was staying in the office, working the phone in search of new contracts and directing his investigators from behind a desk. Although he downplayed their effects on his habits, the bullet wounds he had suffered nearly thirteen years earlier played a major role in limiting his activity. Compounded by years of physical strain and more than a few sips of hard liquor, brittle diabetes was taking a toll on Joe's legendary constitution. His blood sugar rose and fell precipitously and with little warning; Helen kept a testing kit handy and a notable supply of candy and other sweets.

Then one day the flamboyant defense attorney J. W. Carney, Jr., called McCain and said he needed him on a big case. In a lurid tale worthy of the supermarket tabloids, James Kartell, a fifty-nine-year-old plastic surgeon, had confronted his estranged wife's lover in her sickroom at Holy Family Hospital in Methuen, Mass., where Dr. Kartell frequently treated patients. The two men quarreled and during what began as a fistfight, Kartell felt himself being overpowered, drew a revolver from the waistband of his trousers and fired two shots at close range, killing his rival in front of his wife, psychotherapist Dr. Suzan Kamm.

The Kartell case had already drawn a lot of play in the Boston newspapers, and none of it was helping Jay Carney's client. Dr. Kartell, small, roly-poly, and less than photogenic, stretched the caricature of the arrogant physician to its absolute limit. In possession of Mensa-level intelligence and renowned for his prowess with a scalpel, Kartell had trouble uttering a syllable that did not advertise itself as condescending, and the notion of a fat, dumpy egomaniac shooting an unarmed man in a hospital room was not raising an iota of public sympathy.

Enter Joe McCain. In this case, McCain's sympathies would appear to lie with the prosecution: what sort of man fires a second shot into another man's skull when his first shot ended their fight, and why the heck is a doctor carrying a gun in the first place? But as McCain often said to Al Seghezzi, the one thing that he'd always been interested in was the truth. Seghezzi and McCain went back to the late fifties, when Al was a sergeant and Joe a patrolman in the Old Colony district and they both worked in the same building. And while Seghezzi was sometimes troubled by the notion that the P.I. firm was “helping the bad guys” by working on behalf of people like Kartell, the retired Met was comforted by McCain's belief that “sometimes we couldn't help the guy— you don't find stuff that isn't there.”

The day that he was headed to a fact-finding on the Kartell case in Jay Carney's office, big Joe sought out Mark Donahue in his cubicle on Fulton Street. “C'mon. You're gonna work the Kartell case with me,” said McCain.

Donahue was ecstatic but struggled to maintain the stone-faced professional demeanor he'd been taught. “It was kinda Joe's acknowledgment that I was an adult,” said Donahue, who was thirty-seven at the time. “A real murder case.”

McCain and Donahue arrived at the Statler Building in downtown Boston and were joined by a ballistics expert, a doctor, another lawyer from Carney's staff, and Carney himself. “This is like stepping up to the plate for your first major league at-bat,” said Donahue.

The object of the meeting was to arrive at what actually occurred on February 23, 1999, in Room 440 at Holy Family Hospital. Carney explained that James Kartell, plastic surgeon, had been married to Suzan Kamm for thirty-two years and that they had no children, were quite wealthy, and had become estranged. During their separation Dr. Kamm, a moderately attractive woman, had been living with fifty-six-year-old Janos Vajda, a native Hungarian and divorced father of three daughters. The day of the shooting, Dr. Kamm had called her estranged husband to her room, ostensibly to consult with him on her medical condition, which was pneumonia. She had also invited Vajda, a tall, muscularly built man who had once been an Olympic swimmer and still competed at the Master's level.

Kartell told his wife to ask Vajda to leave the room, since he wanted to discuss her case in private. But Kamm replied that her other visitor was free to stay or leave as he wished. Kartell became agitated and took Vajda by the arm. The larger man resisted, and a fight ensued. Vajda quickly got the better of the doughy Kartell, looming over him, knocking him to the floor, smashing punches into his face at will. Afraid that he was about to lose consciousness, Attorney Carney said, Kartell reached around to his lower back, groping for the concealed .38-caliber revolver that he had a permit for and always carried. He fired two shots, dropping his assailant.

Next, the ballistics expert explained that such a weapon could not be accidentally discharged. In minute detail, he described the type of gun that Kartell used, its weight, the properties of the bullets, and the grain of the powder, as well as the exact amount of pressure required to pull back the hammer and depress the trigger. Illustrating his presentation with drawings and crime scene photographs that Mark Donahue called “absolutely gross,” the ballistics man depicted the trajectory of the two bullets and estimated the time that elapsed between them.

“Someone deliberately pulled that trigger,” said Donahue.

Although some media accounts claimed that the first shot disabled Vajda, and then Kartell, extricating himself, walked around the kneeling victim and delivered the fatal blow, execution-style, to the back of the head, Jay Carney's medical expert stated that “the first shot killed the guy,” according to Donahue. The bullet's path through Vajda's shoulder and down into his chest severed a major artery, causing his heart to fail due to volumic incapacity. When that occurred, “the body's natural response was to drop to its knees,” Donahue said.

Newspaper photos taken immediately after Vajda's death showed that Kartell had been absorbing a terrific beating when he drew his gun: both eyes were swollen shut, his nose and jaw broken. A substantial number of people believed— and a jury could perhaps be convinced— that Kartell's initial response was in self-defense. Vajda was banging Kartell's head against a very hard floor, and the first shot had put a stop to that unpleasant activity. What the majority couldn't stomach was that Kartell had fired a second round.

After the doctor finished giving his medical opinion on how Vajda had died, Jay Carney took over the discussion. A colorful, gifted lawyer and veteran of several high-profile defense cases, Carney first set out to establish a reason for Kartell to carry a gun into Holy Family Hospital, which was against their well-established policy. Carney stressed that James Kartell was a gun collector and enthusiast and had never been in trouble with the law. Kartell's father, a New York City judge, had once foiled his own abduction by producing a gun, and Dr. Kartell had lawfully carried one for twenty years. He often performed surgery at Lawrence General Hospital, in a rough inner-city neighborhood, appearing there at all hours to see his patients, and thus had a valid reason to carry a gun, Carney asserted. Ergo, the presence of Vajda in his wife's sickroom had no bearing on the presence of the .38 revolver in the waistband of Dr. Kartell's pants. The gun was always there.

What most people also didn't realize was that Dr. Kartell was almost legally blind. Early in the fight with his wife's lover, Kartell's glasses were knocked off his face. Just as he was losing consciousness, he reached for the gun and fired it “center mass” on his assailant, by that time an indistinct target. Although Vajda was mortally wounded, his adrenaline and superior fitness allowed him to continue fighting, even as he lurched downward, his weight pinning the much smaller man to the floor. Unable to see, Dr. Kartell remained in fear of his life and fired another round.

Jay Carney had a brilliant tactic planned for the courtroom. He was having twelve pairs of eyeglasses made up in Dr. Kartell's prescription so that jurors would understand just how poor his vision was, according to Mark Donahue. “The papers would have you believe that Dr. K said ‘Now you're going to get it,' and then shot him deliberately in the back of the head,” said Donahue. But Carney reminded his team that only two people knew what really happened in Room 440 at Holy Family Hospital: Dr. James Kartell and Suzan Kamm. The job of a good defense lawyer was to create reasonable doubt in the minds of the jurors regarding the scenario that the prosecution would describe.

Carney acknowledged that his hardest task would be getting the jurors to like Dr. Kartell. A markedly unattractive fellow, Dr. Kartell compounded his first impression on people by talking down his nose at them. His favorite topic was himself, and he went around town and through the hospitals where he operated as if ordinary folks weren't even there. He was wealthy and he was smug, never a good combination for eliciting sympathy. But in the course of their investigation, McCain and Donahue spent a lot of time with Kartell, often meeting him for lunch at Bishop's Restaurant in Lawrence, where the doctor would have at their Middle Eastern cuisine like “a man on his way to the gas chamber,” said Donahue. “Which he was.”

IT CERTAINLY LOOKED LIKE the deep six for Dr. James Kartell. When Jay Carney was through talking that day, Joe McCain asked a lot of questions about the ballistics evidence, the exact cause of death, and so on. The D.A. wanted to portray the case as premeditated murder, and it would be up to Joe McCain to prove that Kartell may have despised Janos Vajda but he didn't plan on killing him. The list of witnesses included nurses, security guards, nurse's aides, and other patients who had responded to the tumult in Room 440.

“We have to take every name we have and work it,” McCain said to Donahue.

The first name on everybody's list was Brian McGovern, twenty-seven-year-old nurse's aide who was purported to have been the first person on the scene, just seconds after the shots were fired. McGovern told police that he ran into the room, grabbed Kartell, shoved him against the wall, and asked, “What kind of man are you?”

Upon hearing McGovern's account of these events, McCain said, “It doesn't make sense that he ran into the room. Most people run away from a shooting.”

McCain and Donahue convinced McGovern, after half a dozen attempts, to talk to them. In this instance, McCain was blunt. “Do you think you might have embellished a little?” he asked.

“Basically, he told us to go shit in our hats,” said Donahue of McGovern.

McCain was ailing by this time and was often visited by dreams of Vladimir Lafontant, the man he had killed in a gun battle. One day it got to him pretty bad, and Joe walked over to St. Clement's Church, where he found Father Dever alone in the sacristy, laying out his vestments. “Father, I'd like to talk to you,” he said.

Pastor Dennis A. Dever was roughly the same age as his troubled parishioner, a thin, white-haired man with a raspy voice. “What's bothering you, Joe?” he asked.

“Well, you see, Father, a few years ago I killed a man . . .”

The priest nodded his head. “I know, Joe.”

“Yeah, everyone said he was no good, a Jamaican posse guy, and over the years, Father, I knew the good, the bad, and the ugly, believe me,” said Joe. He wiped his face with a handkerchief and stared off toward the altar.

Father Dever regarded him with a calm look, and after a moment or two in the great silence of the church, Joe continued: “He shot me, and he shot Paul, and I returned fire, and after I was shot he went out in the street and he died right there, in the street.” He rubbed his chin and worked his lips and then looked up at the priest. “It's just bothering the hell out of me, Father, and I want to confess that part of it, and get it over with.”

Father Dever blessed him and absolved him and gave him Hail Marys to recite as penance. “I want to tell you something, Joe,” said the priest. “I've had a bit of psychiatric training, and most people don't know what policemen go through. It's a very, very difficult job that you do.”

“I've been through a lot, Father. Taking bodies out of rivers with a grappling hook, all the shootings, the autopsies,” Joe said.

Father Dever continued to look into his parishioner's eyes. “You know, Joe, some people are put on this earth because they have a mission and they don't know it.”

“I'm not overly religious, Father, in that I come into church and sit in the front row,” said Joe. “I stand in the back; I put my money in the poor box. Whatever the church needs, I give. It's like I'm hedging my bets in case there is a heaven. I'll be the guy, when they tell me I'm dying, who'll be screaming, ‘Where's my priest?'”

Father Dever chuckled. “Always remember, Joe, that you were put on this earth to accomplish certain things, and maybe if this guy gets by you, and the police are coming, he would've shot somebody else, maybe someone's mother. Maybe that's why you were put there on that particular day— to stop him from doing something like that. And because sometimes God's will is hard, you had to pay a price for that.”

Joe McCain sat breathing in the scent of candle wax and incense, and then he reached across and gripped the priest's hand. “I can live with that, Father,” he said.

Joe was getting tired. In a gesture that was more than symbolic, he instructed Mark Donahue to work the names on the Kartell case by himself, with an eye toward contradicting Brian McGovern's version of the story. The young nurse's aide's tale may have been adopted as gospel by the newspapers, but to McCain it still didn't add up. He knew from his own experience that everyone wants to be a hero, although few have the mettle for it. That role is not chosen but thrust upon you.

As a kid, Mark Donahue had spent the lion's share of his free time at the McCains', and Joe had been grooming him for such a job since he'd started as a detective. But working a murder case was a lot different from tailing some deadbeat who was cheating on workmen's comp.

After numerous interviews that went nowhere, Donahue was getting to the end of his list when, late one afternoon in December, he drove to Haverhill, Mass. and knocked on the door to Thomas Montecalvo's apartment. Montecalvo was one of several unarmed security guards working at Holy Family Hospital the day Vajda was killed. No longer employed at the hospital, Montecalvo had kept a low profile, eschewing media interviews and responding to anyone who asked him about Dr. Kartell that Holy Family management wanted all inquiries routed back to them. Thomas Montecalvo was just a name on a piece of paper.

He came to the door that afternoon in a Massachusetts Police Academy sweatshirt, his hair buzzed short. Cutting Donahue off in midsentence, Montecalvo said that he didn't want to talk. He hadn't really seen anything that day and was busy doing other things.

“You a cop?” asked Donahue.

Montecalvo said, with a measure of pride, that he had graduated from the academy a couple of months earlier and was on the job in Lawrence. Donahue noted that he was a cop, too, and just wanted to ask a few basic questions.

“Okay, I'll give you a minute,” said Montecalvo, opening the storm door.

The two men went into Montecalvo's kitchen. Producing a little notebook, Donahue asked the former security guard where he was assigned and what he'd been doing when Dr. Kartell shot Vajda. He almost dropped his pencil when Montecalvo replied that he'd been the first security officer to respond and the only other person on the scene except for Suzan Kamm. As he approached the room, Dr. Kartell was coming out. He handed Montecalvo his weapon and allowed himself to be escorted to a small room off the nurses' station, where they both waited for police.

“Actually, I fucked up,” said Montecalvo. “I had a radio. I should've just called for help and sat back and let the guy come out. I had no idea what his state of mind was.”

Donahue asked if anyone else was there in the room or hallway with him; specifically, had Brian McGovern already disarmed Kartell and had conversations with anybody?

“No,” said Montecalvo. “I was the only one there.”

Thomas Montecalvo's account established two things: Brian McGovern was not telling the truth, and Dr. Kartell was no longer aggressive or pursuing the fight when help arrived. In fact, Montecalvo described Kartell as a “wet rat”; he was completely beaten up.

“And this kid had credibility, because he was a cop,” said Donahue.

Donahue took notes and hustled out to his car. He made the thirty-minute drive back to the office in a state of rising excitement and told McCain the entire story. “Joe got right on the phone with Carney's office,” said Donahue. “They were ecstatic.”

With Montecalvo testifying in his police uniform, Jay Carney was able to debunk McGovern's account of Kartell's belligerence. Although facing charges of first-degree murder, Kartell was convicted of voluntary manslaughter and received only a five- to eight-year prison term, which he is currently serving at the Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center in Shirley, Mass.

“What I learned is, even if you think a witness has nothing to say, you have to be persistent,” said Donahue. “A lot of people said they were told by the hospital not to talk to anyone, to go through their legal office. Joe used to say, ‘This is America. You can talk to anyone you want, about anything you want.'”