Strangled (17 page)

Translated: It’s driving us fucking crazy that we’ve even had to admit there’s a serial murderer on the loose and that we have no idea who or where he is. The fucking media, meaning you, Jack Flynn, should stay the fuck out of our way. Or else.

“With the third victim murdered in similar fashion, we are now pursuing the theory of a single killer, even while we continue to keep all other options open and under investigation. Many of you have posed the question as to whether this could in any way be linked to the killings in the Boston Strangler spree from mid-1962 to early 1964, much as a serial killer in Wichita, Kansas, emerged after two decades of silence and criminal inactivity.”

No translation necessary here. Ten minutes in, he was finally getting interesting, even making news. I hadn’t taken a note yet, but marked my legal pad with the letters BTK — the acronym for “bind, torture, kill,” the self-administered nickname for the Kansan killer who had reached out to the news media some twenty years after his last known slaying.

“That, obviously, is impossible here. The man who confessed to being the Boston Strangler, Albert DeSalvo, was killed in prison in 1973. I personally worked on that case in the early sixties. In the last couple of days, I have gone back and reread key parts of his confession from 1965. I am as convinced now as I was then that DeSalvo was, indeed, the perpetrator of those violent crimes, and what we have now is a copycat killer, seeking fame and press attention that he is receiving, and that consequently is fueling his desire to kill again.”

Translated: Don’t you dare question the good work from the sixties that propelled my rocket ride to the commissioner’s office. And by the way, this whole thing is the news media’s fault.

“We have already consulted with some of the most distinguished and accomplished criminal profilers in the country, who have compiled a psychological composite of the perpetrator of these crimes. As we review and refine it, we will make our findings public. In the meantime, I will say that any suspect is certainly a male, probably someone who lives alone, perhaps grew up in a single-parent household with a strong mother or maybe dominant older sisters, works in a largely unheralded job, craves attention that he doesn’t get in his everyday life, and likely has a criminal record involving other violent crimes. We suspect he’s in his thirties or forties, and for obvious reasons, we believe he has a keen interest in history.”

My cell phone vibrated in my jacket pocket, and I pulled it out, assuming I’d see Peter Martin’s number on the caller ID, Martin thinking I should already have half the story written before the press conference was actually over. But by the time I got the phone in hand, the vibrations had stopped. A notice appeared on the face of the phone informing me that I had a text message. How Modern Age, though not really.

I had a girlfriend for what seemed like the duration of a cup of coffee who used to text-message me every time she wanted sex, which, as it turned out, was quite often, which was good until the day it wasn’t, but that’s not really the point here. I pressed a few buttons and the message appeared on my screen: “The phantom fiend is the boston strangler. i know. i am him. will contact you asap. pf.”

I stared at it in disbelief, and not just because of my confusion over whether “I am him” was proper grammar. I had received two typed notes accompanying the driver’s licenses of fresh murder victims that most assuredly came from the Phantom Fiend, as well as a DVD that could only have come from the Phantom Fiend. In addition, I got the phone call from someone who claimed to be him, though I doubt it, given the result, which was almost my death but instead was that of an innocent bystander. But this, a text message on my cell phone? Could a serial killer who had emerged from forty years of dormancy really be so technologically savvy? Or did a text message even count as technological savviness anymore?

I reread the note again, noticing for the first time that there was an origination number on the bottom of the text message, causing my heart to skip a beat. Maybe the Phantom Fiend wasn’t as savvy as he thought he was. Maybe it was his phone number, easily traceable through cell phone records. Maybe this simple clue, this junior varsity mistake, would break the case, much in the same way Sam Berkowitz’s parking ticket near a murder scene helped break open the Son of Sam spree in New York City.

I reread the message yet again. The commissioner prattled on with the requisite thanks for the widespread cooperation among departments and agencies, even though the Boston Police was constantly at war with the state police and the FBI. Translated: We’re taking control of this thing and if any other agency tries sticking their incompetent and corrupt noses into our investigation, we’ll pummel them senseless.

Fuck the commissioner, fuck his defensive by-the-numbers press conference, fuck his nonsensical blame-the-media strategy. Maybe I should give him exactly what he wanted, I thought: raise my hand and announce, “Sir, I have just received word from the Phantom Fiend that he is, in fact, the Boston Strangler, contrary to the theory that you are pursuing in your own investigation.”

I decided against that. Instead, I stepped out of the room into the lobby, where I had been surrounded by my comrades-in-words twenty minutes earlier and dialed the number that was on the bottom of the message. It rang three times before the recorded voice of a woman came on announcing that this line didn’t take incoming calls, and to please check the number again and try redialing. I did as told, as I occasionally do, with the same result.

Before I could place the next call that I wanted to make, my phone vibrated again, this time with Peter Martin’s number on the caller ID.

“Are you watching this bullshit?” I said, picking up the phone.

“I was,” he said, his tone less calm than it had been the night before. “Right now I’m watching something else. I’m watching a video of Kimberly May’s apartment on a blog site called Hubaloo.com — ‘all the news the
Record
won’t print.’ They’ve got the entire clip, and they’re showing her body unimpeded — just a dead girl on the web. I don’t know how they got it — a police department leak, or whether your Phantom gave it to them. But right now the site has so many hits that it’s already crashed twice on me while I’m watching.”

“Clever name and slogan,” I said. At the same time, I swore under my breath — stupid goddamned bloggers, freaks of nature who sit around their dingy apartments in ratty bathrobes and black socks posting total crap on the web and thinking it counts as hipster journalism, the next big thing.

“I’ll tell you one thing,” Martin said, his tone growing uncharacteristically angry now. “Seeing this makes me truly believe we did the right thing by not running it. The ad people could die because of the dollars we would have made, but not worth it.”

Then he asked, “You on your way back here?” I thought so at the time, so I answered in the affirmative. We hung up and I placed an immediate call to Vinny Mongillo in the newsroom. I asked him to check with his phone company sources on the number that appeared at the bottom of the text message. He put me on hold, came back, and said, “That traces to one of those disposable cells. It was purchased with cash. There’s no name on the account. You’re out of luck.”

“Could you check and see if they know what other calls were made from that phone? Maybe I can track down someone who was called by the owner.”

“Already did, Fair Hair. No other calls to this point.”

“You think they’d be willing to monitor it for future use?”

“They’re already planning on it.”

“Dinner tonight?” I asked.

“Well, now you owe me, so at a place of my choosing. You’re on your way in here? We need to go over the Paul Vasco information. We should be able to pay a call on him at our earliest convenience.”

“Which may well be today. I’ll be in shortly.”

The door to the media room flung open and the reporters and their cameramen poured out en masse. The press conference was over. Within minutes, CNN, FOX News, MSNBC, and, later, the three networks would authoritatively report that the serial killer was profiled by crime analysts as being a history buff in search of attention that he never got in his everyday life, careful and media-savvy, a new Boston Strangler for a new generation.

And that serial killer would soon be telling me things I wasn’t ready to hear.

I
quite literally jumped out of the Navigator as Toby glided to a stop at the front door of the
Boston Record
. I bounded up the few stairs and into the glassed-in front lobby, where Edgar Sullivan was there to greet me.

“They don’t pay you enough, Edgar,” I said, striding past him as he leaned on the reception desk.

He began walking alongside me, keeping pace, the two of us heading side by side toward the escalator. He replied in a confiding voice, “Are you kidding me? Most guys my age are sitting on folding chairs in the rec rooms of retirement communities all over this country. They’d give their left walnut to have just five minutes of the excitement I’m having trying to help you escape Father Fate.”

I looked at him, at his neatly pressed blue blazer and tan pants that were in sharp contrast to his wrinkled face and hands, old but young, stern but happy. He was between wives, was his line, meaning he was between his fourth and fifth wives, assuming the next one would come along, which she undoubtedly would. I pictured him sitting in a neighborhood tavern after work beside a date twenty years his junior, explaining to her how he had pulled the paper’s kiester out of the fire again that day as he single-handedly tried to make this city safe for its entire female population. Retirement my ass.

“You know you’re doing one hell of a job on this, right?” I said this in all seriousness.

Edgar replied, “I’m just doing my job, Jack. It’s you who’s putting yourself at risk and writing this great stuff.”

I shook my head. “I don’t really have much of a choice. I’ve been put in the middle here. You — you could be off playing golf or throwing baseballs with the grandkids.”

“Ah, my golf game is awful and my grandkids are brats.” He hesitated, then added, “They’re good kids, actually. They’re just not into sports.”

We were at the top of the escalator now, walking toward the newsroom, still shoulder-to-shoulder, moving fast. Edgar pulled a white envelope from inside his jacket pocket. He held it out in front of us and said, “Jack, this came for you via courier about twenty minutes ago. My guys were under orders to grab me before any courier left. They did. I questioned him and he said the account was paid in cash, and he has no name, and no return address. He picked up the package from a man who he said he couldn’t identify, on a street corner in Downtown Crossing. I haven’t opened it. Maybe it’s nothing. But it’s starting to fit a pattern, and I thought you’d want to see it right away.”

He handed me the sealed envelope with my name typed on the front in small letters in a familiar font — familiar because it was the same size and font as the type on the envelope that contained Jill Dawson’s driver’s license four days before.

Four days. Seemed like four weeks, or four months, a veritable lifetime ago.
You’re going to help me get the word out or other women will die. The Phantom Fiend.
That’s what he wrote at the time, and I still wasn’t sure what he meant. The only thing I was sure about was that other women had died, and more women were undoubtedly about to. As a matter of fact, I was probably holding either a death sentence or a perverted death certificate in my very hand. What the “word” was, how I was supposed to help get it out, whether I could help, these were the things I didn’t know.

Until now.

We were walking into the newsroom, toward my desk. Edgar said, “Do you want me to stay with you while you open it?” He nodded toward the envelope as he spoke. “You know, could be anthrax or some other chemical.”

“Not his style, if this is even from him,” I answered. “Give me a moment with it.” He peeled off. I made my way through the maze of desks in the busy newsroom at the start of another news cycle.

Once I settled in, Martin, of course, arrived in about three nanoseconds with a whirl of questions, expectations, and instructions. I asked him to give me a minute, perhaps not as politely as I might have. Oddly enough, without questioning me, he did, and walked away.

I carefully opened the envelope with a painfully familiar sense of dread. Another correspondence, another dead woman, whether it be Jill Dawson or Lauren Hutchens or Kimberly May. Maybe I should have been invigorated to be injected this far into the biggest unfolding story in the country, but what I really felt was a gloomy sense of futility, and the worst thing a reporter can feel is futile, even if we so often are. I heard about each of these women after they were no longer alive. My reporting only brought bad news. My published words could do nothing to help them. I could only carry the distant hope that I might be bringing a sense of caution to those who would — or perhaps wouldn’t — be next.

I reached into the envelope and felt a single sheet of paper, but nothing else — meaning no disc that would show a dead woman’s body splayed out in her apartment, no driver’s license to lead us to the next victim. The sheet was folded over once. I opened it up and looked at it warily.

“Dear Mr. Flynn,” it began, again in that same printed font. “It is well known that no one was ever charged or convicted of any of the killings attributed to the Boston Strangler. What is less well known, except among a small group of experts, is that the real Boston Strangler is alive, well, and killing again today. I am the Boston Strangler. The authorities have it as wrong now as they did in 1965. You should ask them why. The answer, should they choose to give it, will be of enormous public interest.

“I will kill again, soon. If you don’t print this note, verbatim, above the fold on the front page of tomorrow’s newspaper, I will double the pace of my killing. Blood will be on your hands.

“The Phantom Fiend, also known as, The Boston Strangler.”

Okay, a couple of things are worth noting here, the first, and perhaps most obvious, is that we had a grammatically correct killer on the loose in Boston. I mean, good God, I didn’t write English as elegant as my cold-blooded correspondent, and I wrote for a living. It was as if he was writing a thank-you note to the queen.

That aside, three bodies later, he finally got around to answering the question of what he wanted from me: fame. He wanted to be on center stage in Boston, and he wanted my newspaper, the
Record,
to put him there. He wanted to intrigue the city with his words and hold it captive with his vicious actions. He wanted to play me. In turn, he wanted the newspaper to play its readership. He wanted me to be involved at the dead — pardon the pun — center of this story in a way reporters usually aren’t. He wanted my newspaper to do things newspapers usually don’t, in the name of a person who doesn’t do what normal people do, which is kill multiple women.

This, in short, was not a good state of affairs.

I reread the note. One hand was shadowing my eyes, while my other hand held the single sheet of paper. That hand, I realized, was trembling. He was short, firm, to the point. Maybe he was like that in real life. Lines kept jumping off the page at me —
I am the Boston Strangler…You should ask them why…I will kill again, soon…I will double the pace of my killing…Blood will be on your hands.

I had Bob Walters, the former Boston Police detective at the head of the old Strangler investigation, telling me that DeSalvo was the wrong guy. Unfortunately, he was very recently deceased. I had the current killer of three women — and counting — telling me DeSalvo was the wrong guy. Unfortunately, neither was available for questions, Walters never again, and my correspondent not for the moment.

On the other side of the ledger, it was starting to seem like all the lead people who had implicated DeSalvo in the Strangler case had benefited enormously from their actions in the investigation — most notably Hal Harrison, the detective who became police commissioner and was now vying to be mayor, and Stu Callaghan, the former Massachusetts attorney general who went on to win a seat in the United States Senate.

The authorities have it as wrong now as they did in 1965. You should ask them why.

This implies that authorities knew they had it wrong some forty-plus years ago, and know they have it wrong again. My head hurt, not from too much information, but from a lack of it. What I needed were some answers from people who either weren’t shooting straight or weren’t around to speak.

“All right, long enough. What did it say? Is this going to carry the day for us tomorrow?”

That was Martin, reappearing at my desk, a bundle of nervousness and personality quirks. He was scratching at his forehead. He was tapping what looked like his Buster Brown shoes against the bottom drawer of my desk, and not in any particular rhythm. His right eye seemed to be twitching. Forget that Zen zone he would often enter. He looked like Nomar Garciaparra stepping up to the plate.

I merely shook my head in response and handed him the note to read himself, which he did, first fast, and then a second time slowly, all the while standing over me. What I was coming to learn about Martin, perhaps later than I should have, was that it was never news that made him nervous, but the lack of it. News he can handle. News he can revel in, shape, edit, then publish. It’s not having news, not having information, not having something that the competition doesn’t that makes him near crazy. For this, he will always have my respect.

“What the fuck,” he said, but he said it in a tone that betrayed an enjoyment of the decision that was to come, that decision being whether to publish the Phantom Fiend’s words, verbatim. Then he added, “Any idea if he’s sent this to any other media outlets?”

“My best read is that he’s still dealing exclusively with us. He sent me a text message on my cell phone earlier this morning saying pretty much the same thing.”

“I don’t even know how to send a text message,” Martin said. “Then again, I don’t know how to strangle a woman, either.”

With that, Martin said, “My office in twenty minutes.” As he walked away, he shook the Strangler’s note in his left hand and said, “I’m going to need this until then.”

I was on the telephone with the Las Vegas Police Department, trying to ascertain the cause of death of Bob Walters, or at least their version of the cause, when I saw them walking along the outer edges of the newsroom.

They were two middle-aged guys in ill-fitting suits with bad haircuts, meaning they were cops — detectives, actually, maybe homicide. I could spot them a mile away. It’s as if every cop over forty in the city went to the same barber, the one they had since childhood. For that matter, they all seemed to have the same tailor, the one who thought it better to keep their cuffed pants nice and short.

These two gentlemen were accompanied by one of Edgar Sullivan’s minions, who led them in silence toward Peter Martin’s office. I watched as they paused briefly outside Martin’s office before being escorted in. At that point, I couldn’t see them anymore — until, that is, they came walking back through the newsroom just a few minutes later. This time one of them was carrying an envelope in his hairy hand.

At that point, an e-mail flashed on my screen from Martin, asking to convene a meeting.

When I walked into Martin’s office, Publisher Justine Steele was already there, sitting in one of half a dozen upholstered chairs that surrounded a perfectly forgettable coffee table. Martin sat in a chair facing her. Right behind me, Vinny Mongillo walked in carrying a brown bag with what smelled like cat excrement, but ended up being an Italian cold-cut sub slathered in various oils and spices.

As he unwrapped it on the coffee table, I think I saw Justine physically gag. Martin reflexively reached for a stash of paper napkins inside a desk drawer. I said, “Jesus Christ, Vinny, it’s ten-thirty in the morning. What the hell are you doing with that crap?”

“Crap?” he replied, incredulous. “These are some of the finest cured meats that money can buy, shipped here straight from Genoa, Italy, by artisan chefs. The hell you talking about crap? And I’ve been up since five a.m., so this is like your late afternoon.”

I can’t argue with that. Actually, I probably could, but Martin interjected. “All right, we need to figure out fast how we’re going to handle this letter. Let me bring you up to date on what we’ve already done.”

I was tieless and jacketless. I don’t know why I bring that up, except for I rolled up my sleeves and let my bare forearms rest against my knees, and as I did, a little piece of pickle came flying off Mongillo’s sub and landed in the little hairs below my wrist. I flicked it on the carpet and stared at Martin.

“Jack, as soon as I got the copy of the letter from you, I, of course, flagged Justine.” Martin nodded toward Justine as if none of us knew who she was. The two of them gave each other a funny look, though not funny in the ha - ha - that - Jack - Flynn - is - sucha - riot kind of way.

“Justine, in turn, felt it important to alert Mara Laird about the existence of this new correspondence. I agreed with her on that. We got pummeled pretty hard in the
Traveler
today, I believe unfairly so, about not being cooperative enough with police. We want to make sure we look like we’re doing everything in our power to help them catch this killer.”

At this point, Martin was slowly easing into that Zen-like tone that he gets, the one with the exaggerated sense of calm. Justine listened to him intently. Mongillo finished the first half of his submarine sandwich and lit into the rest. I sat in still silence, starting to get slowly pissed off, though why, I wasn’t quite sure yet.

Martin continued, “Justine, do you want to fill us in on your conversation with the mayor?”

It all sounded rehearsed. Justine nodded, looked from me to Mongillo and back to me again, and said, “She’s not thrilled with this — or with us. The conversation was brief. She put me on a conference call with Hal Harrison, and the two of them said that if we publish that letter, as the writer of it wants us to do, we will push the city of Boston into a state of what they called ‘unwarranted chaos.’ ”

As she said those last two words, she looked down at a sheet of notes she had in her hand.

She continued, again looking down. “They said we would be ‘seriously impeding’ their investigation — again, their words. They said they need another day or two to” — she gazed down again here — “ ‘fully develop some promising leads.’ And in no uncertain terms, they said that if we go ahead and print that letter, we should never again expect to receive help on breaking stories from Boston PD, or, for that matter, from city hall.”