Strangled (9 page)

I
was in the middle of this dream when I was awakened by the ringing telephone. I looked at the digital clock beside my bed and it said 5:40 a.m. The first thing I thought was that I had to get myself to Suffolk Downs that day and bet the trifecta, my mind was working on that kind of level. I mean, this was a very meta moment, but meta what, I wasn’t sure.

Second thing I thought of was that I was going to ring Peter Martin’s scrawny little neck, because there was absolutely no one else in the world this could be, and there was precisely no good reason for him to call. I reached for the cordless phone and mistakenly knocked it to the floor, where it kept ringing, ringing, ringing — the sound penetrating through my eye sockets and into my skull. When I finally grabbed it and said hello in a voice still thick with sleep, all I heard in return was a dial tone.

I flopped back down in the dark room, muttering to myself, “That goddamned bastard.” In other words, a terrific way to start the new day.

Seconds later, the phone rang anew. “What,” I said.

“Turn on the radio.”

It was, as predicted, Peter Martin, failing in what was becoming too typical a way to wish me a good morning or to inquire about my relative health or spirits, or even offer an apology for not prevailing on the publisher to run the most important story in the city that day. No, just an order to listen to the radio.

“There’s a lot of stations on the radio,” I replied, caustic now.

“Any special one I should find?”

“FM 99. The Barry Bor Show. Hurry up.”

Even in my foggy state, I didn’t like where this was heading. Barry Bor was a dim-witted cross between Howard Stern and Bill O’Reilly, minus their refined manners and classic good looks. He made hundreds of thousands of dollars every year by basically insulting people and saying outrageous things. He was a hero to morons; a guilty pleasure for quasi-smart people on their morning commute to work; a torturer of politicians; a flagellator of the rest of the Boston and national press. Everyone, in his mind, was stupid — everyone, of course, but him.

I’ll put aside the obvious question of what in God’s good name Peter Martin was doing listening to Barry Bor at five-forty on a weekday morning. The guy needed more help than was probably possible — Martin, not Bor, though probably Bor as well. I quickly hung up the phone, grabbed the remote to my Bose clock radio, and turned to FM 99.

“Ladies and gentlemen, you are the chosen ones who know intuitively when you tune into this show each and every morning that you’re listening to something special, something that only the elite thinkers in this city can truly comprehend. And now you can be more assured of that fact than ever before. Could I ever possibly feel more vindicated?”

Lying in bed, Bor’s admittedly sonorous voice filling the room, I felt a pit in my stomach. Whatever this was, it wasn’t going to be good.

“Before we go on, let’s make a few stipulations. Let’s accept as fact that what the stupid analysts on all those fatuous cable shows call ‘the mainstream media,’ let’s accept that it’s really not all that mainstream anymore. What those liberal blowhards at papers like
The New York Times
and
The Washington Post
and the
Boston Record
and at the network news shows like CBS and NBC, what they are is tired, old, biased curmudgeons — liars, plagiarists, unreliable navel-gazers who wouldn’t know a piece of news if it crawled up their fat asses as they sit at their desks reading
The New Republic
and waiting for Hillary Clinton to call them back to tell them what to say and write.

“They’re all done. They’re part of a dying industry. And I have the goods to prove it now. I’m one-stop shopping — politics, news, analysis, anything you need, right here on the Barry Bor Show. And this morning, we’re about to break brand-new ground yet again.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I received a telephone call this morning. It was a very important call….”

Oh fuck. Before he even said it, I knew what it was. My pen pal, the Phantom Fiend or the Boston Strangler or whatever it is that he turned out to be, became undoubtedly frustrated with my inability to get his story into print, so he went to the Barry Bor Show on FM 99, where he knows that anything goes. Think about it. Why was this guy writing to a reporter, except that he wanted publicity? And what was I not giving to him? Anyone? Anyone? Right, publicity. I slammed my fist against the mattress, but all I could do was listen to my own ineptitude — or rather, that of the paper. Maybe Bor’s diatribe, sickening as it was, was actually right, and that’s what made it all so awful.

“A murderer called me. We’re not going to glamorize him just because he had the intellectual firepower to seek out Barry Bor. After all, even though he’s one of the chosen ones, he’s still a murderer, and though we can forgive a lot, we can’t quite forgive that — not unless it comes out later that he was only killing abortionists or stem-cell cloning scientists or anyone supporting the Social Security system exactly as it is now.

“I’m kidding, chosen ones, I’m kidding, so before any of those waddling, fat-assed critics at the
Record
start hassling me again, well, I’ve got something you don’t. I’ve got you beat on a crime story.

“So back to it. This murderer, he called me here at the Barry Bor Show as we were getting ready to go on the air this morning. I talk to a lot of people during show prep, as you can well imagine — congressmen and senators and sitting governors and retired presidents and big-time consultants. Rarely do I talk to murderers — except when the stray Democrat gets through on the line.”

By this point, I was up out of bed and getting dressed, only because I needed to move, to expend energy, while I listened to this pathological idiot prattle on about himself as he held information on a story that should have been exclusively mine. Here I was, at five forty-five now in the morning, listening to my own failure get broadcast across the city.

“He called me and referred me to a blog, but only under the condition that I not publicly reveal the address of the site, which I won’t. Barry Bor keeps his word, even to murderers. When you talk for a living, your word has to be gold, and mine is.

“On this blog were pictures of a young woman whose name is Lauren Hutchens. I’d be remiss in not informing you that she is quite a looker. But in this picture that was posted online, she also appears to be dead, with a cord around her neck. The site also contains a photograph of her driver’s license.

“I personally checked police records online, and have come to learn that a Lauren Hutchens was recently found murdered in the Fenway section of Boston. No one has been arrested in the crime. Whoever should be, that person is busy calling me. Ladies and gentlemen, I, Barry Bor, am in touch with a murderer, and the most chilling part I’ve yet to tell you. I will — right after this commercial message.”

“Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.”

That was me, yelling at the damned Bose radio that sat on a small armoire in my room — such an innocent object, such a bearer of bad news on this morning.

The phone rang again, undoubtedly with Martin on the other end of the line. I picked it up with a clipped “I can’t believe we screwed up this badly.”

There were a few seconds of silence in response, which instantly struck me as bizarre. When there was still no response, I said, “Hello. Peter?”

The caller asked, “Are you listening to the Barry Bor Show?”

Whoever asked that question asked it in a voice that sounded in some way automated — as if he was talking through a scrambler or a synthesizer.

“Who’s calling?” I asked, blurting out the words.

“Are you listening to the Barry Bor Show?” Again, the words had that slightly synthetic quality to them.

I said, “I am. But who is this?”

“Why didn’t you write about me in today’s newspaper?”

Now my shoulders reflexively shuddered and my head clouded anew. I kind of knew how Barry Bor felt. I’ve talked to presidents and senators and even killers after the fact. But I’ve never talked to an unknown murderer who was vowing to kill again.

I said, “I was trying to get you in today’s paper. We didn’t think we had enough information.”

“You know Lauren Hutchens is dead. I killed her. You know Jill Dawson is dead. I killed her, too. And I’m going to kill again.”

The way he said
kill,
the
k
tripped over itself and the
ll
had a long echo to it, making it sound somewhere far beyond macabre, especially since I was reasonably sure he would follow up on his threats. I shook my head and pushed my shoulders back, silently attempting to get a grip on myself, and I said, “Why did you call Barry Bor?”

Now, I’ll admit, there were a lot of lead questions I could have posed to this admitted murderer, not the least of which were: Why are you killing? When will you kill again? Who will you kill? Will you give yourself up? I could have even asked the completely self-interested question: Did you try to kill me, or if not, do you know who did? But here I was, worried not so much about the safety of Boston’s female population as I was about the competitive position of the
Boston Record
.

The caller replied, “I contacted you first. You ignored me.”

“I didn’t ignore you. We need more information from you. I’m not a damned radio talk show. I deal in facts, and I need more of them.” I hesitated here, hesitated at the thought of what I was about to do, then said, “And we need you to work exclusively through the
Record.
”

I used the word
work,
as if what he was doing was political fund-raising or maybe whistle-blowing on some unraveling government project, everything polite and aboveboard and squarely on the side of virtue. But the reality was that I was trying to sell my paper and myself to a killer so we could get the exclusive story. There are some days I think I probably would’ve been better off if I had followed an old girlfriend’s advice and gone to law school. This day was foremost among them — and it wasn’t even six in the morning yet.

He remained silent, so I filled the void with “We can work together, but that won’t happen if you’re talking to inflammatory talk show hosts who aren’t going to treat your information with the respect that the
Record
would. And because you’re dealing through a medium that no one takes seriously, people, the public, aren’t going to take you seriously.”

Here I was, giving my full-on sales pitch to a guy who had strangled two women, actually stood there tightening a ligature around their necks and watching the life leave their panicked eyes. And I was trying to sell him on a relationship with the
Record
. I made a mental note that I was a complete asshole.

“What kind of information?” he asked.

Good question. What was I going to say, Hold the line while I call the damned publisher and ask her what the hell else she needs before we put this story into print? I wisely, even uncharacteristically, bit my tongue and instead asked, “Are you the Boston Strangler? And why are you doing this?”

The caller said, “Go to the bench in the northwest corner of Columbus Park at nine a.m. Don’t get there a minute beforehand or you’ll never hear from me again. Don’t call the police or you’ll never hear from me again. Bring your cell phone.”

He hung up. I could still hear the
n
vibrating on the word
phone
because of the synthesizer he was using.

As I put the receiver down, I listened to Barry Bor say on the radio, “Ladies and gentlemen, the chosen few, you are listening to talk radio history here today. We, meaning you and me, are making history. I have been talking to a gruesome murderer who is vowing to kill again, and will tell us where and when he strangles his next woman…”

I flipped the stereo off and the room went quiet except for the sounds of the ocean breeze pushing against the outside window — at least I hoped it was the breeze that was nudging the window. Who knew anymore?

Pleading with a killer for an exclusive story. Another day in the life of the intrepid reporter, and it would quickly get worse from there.

The
day came bright and breezy, the breeze carrying with it more than a hint of spring. The sun caressed my cheeks with its golden fingers. The grass was even turning from winter brown to a pale shade of green.

So why, then, did I still feel such doom as I strode from Atlantic Avenue into Columbus Park at about two minutes to nine on this Wednesday morning? Well, first off, there are the obvious answers. I suspected the day would bring with it more death, most likely of yet another innocent young woman long before her time.

Second, I was still infuriated at my own newspaper for blowing a blockbuster story and putting me in this kind of bind with an admitted killer. And I wasn’t exactly pleased with myself over the unseemly telephone negotiations that I carried on that morning with this man who called himself the Phantom Fiend.

Third, there was no small amount of trepidation that I was being set up here on this park bench by whoever tried to kill me on the Charles River two nights before. Or maybe that’s
whomever
. I can never figure these things out. That said, I hoped that since he picked a place so prominent and a time so public, he wouldn’t be trying anything funny.

Finally, this was the park where I used to bring Baker virtually every day for the past many years to romp and fetch a tennis ball until his tongue was hanging to the ground. Baker was my old golden retriever, dead a little more than a year now, but never a flicker of the memory from my mind. We always saw the first red leaf of autumn together, the first flake of winter, and the first bud of spring. We were an item then, and I thought we always would be, until the day when he was diagnosed with advanced cancer at Angell Memorial Hospital and taken from me before I barely had a chance to say good-bye.

Okeydoke. So, we’re off to a perfectly terrific start to yet another wonderful day, one that would surely include murder and at least a little mayhem, as well as lame excuses from my newpaper higher-ups for their colossal screw-up, pleas for dinner invitations from Vinny Mongillo, and maybe a face-to-face meeting with a past and present serial killer who calls himself the Phantom Fiend. What was my alternative — to have gotten married to a beautiful woman and jetted off to a resort in gorgeous Hawaii? Then again, Maggie Kane hadn’t left that alternative on the table for me, not as she was fleeing on a connecting flight through the Atlanta airport to God only knows where. Maybe she was in Hawaii, which wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing, because at least someone would be getting use of a hotel that I had already paid for.

Ah yes, a great day getting even greater.

I found my way to a bench in what I believed was the far northwest corner of the park. It looked out over the grass, through a bare trellis, toward a part of Boston Harbor where I once swam in pursuit of an escaping intruder in the middle of the night, in what I guess I’d now refer to as the good old days. Now that I thought of it, I should apply for hazardous duty pay. Either that or enroll in swimming lessons at the YMCA and send Peter Martin the bill.

So there I sat, thinking, waiting, and wondering. I wasn’t there but two minutes when my cell phone chimed. When I answered, all I heard was silence.

Well, not exactly total silence. I heard what sounded like a young calf chewing on its cud.

“Mongillo?” I asked.

“Oh, hey, sorry, Fair Hair. I’m on the treadmill and didn’t hear you pick up.”

“Are you eating and running? Isn’t that illegal?”

“Just a PowerBar. And no, I’m being careful.”

He was out of breath, I noticed. I mean, really out of breath, as in, I was half tempted to ask him if I could be the beneficiary on his 401(k) plan and hold a microcassette up to the damned phone.

He said, “Did you hear your boy on the Barry Bor Show?”

Jesus, the whole world listened to that stupid call-in program at that ungodly hour. I replied, “Me and everyone else in Boston. We really fucked up.”

“That we did, but nothing more you or I could have done to prevent it. Listen, I have a pretty good guess where the next murder is going to be. How about we meet for lunch to talk about it.”

“You’re saying you know who he’s going to kill and you want to go have lunch?”

“No, I’m saying I think I know what neighborhood, or even street, he might kill next. And yes on lunch. Nice of you to ask.”

“I’ve got a meeting. I’m not sure if I’ll be out. But I’ll call you.”

He asked, “Who’s the meeting with?”

“The Phantom.” Then I added, “I’ve got to leave this line open. Call you soon.”

He was whistling as I hung up the phone — chewing, panting, and whistling.

A moment later, an elderly man ambled past, still dressed for winter in a long wool herringbone coat, even though the day was screaming spring. People are like that in this town — suspicious of the weather, slow to acknowledge that the season is really changing, always believing that the next wind is going to send another cold front or storm system our way.

This old man, though, he was looking at me, almost studying me, and the truth is, he looked familiar.

He stopped short and said, “Excuse me, but did you used to have a dog?”

I wondered if that was some sort of code for “I’m the Phantom Fiend and I just committed another murder.” I replied, “I did, but he died about a year ago of cancer.”

He nodded slowly and said, “I used to watch the two of you play fetch out here in the mornings. You were quite a pair.”

Well, okay, I wasn’t sure I knew how this morning could get any worse. I said, “Thank you,” but he had already turned and was walking off.

My phone chimed again.

“Any luck?”

It was Peter Martin, once more not seeing the need for the kind of manners that separate human beings from lower forms of life.

“It depends what you call luck. If you’re asking if I’ve been approached yet by a serial murderer and asked to go take a car ride to a dark warehouse where my life will be immediately endangered, the answer is no. But in that same regard, I also feel kind of lucky, so the answer would be yes.”

He dismissed that line without even seeming to think about it.

“No sign of him yet?”

“No.”

“Keep me posted.”

We hung up. I scanned the park. There were a few young mothers pushing strollers together on the cement path closest to the shoreline. Businessmen and -women were coming and going in either direction. A maintenance worker was spearing loose litter with a sharp-edged pole and placing the trash in a plastic bag.

In other words, there were abundant witnesses to anything that might happen here, which was a relief, but which also made me wonder if the Phantom or the Strangler or whatever he might like to be called would be frightened off by the exposure of the venue. But he’s the one who picked the spot.

I should also mention that Edgar Sullivan, the
Record
’s aging but no less relentless director of security, was somewhere with a view of this park, if not actually in it, per Martin’s orders. We had discussed calling the police, but immediately dismissed it because of the myriad possibilities that they would screw things up.

My phone chimed anew.

“Flynn,” I said.

“Go into the trash can to your immediate right and pull out today’s
Boston Traveler
. Open up to page thirty-eight and see the destination written across the top of the page. Place the newspaper back in the receptacle, do not pick up your phone again, and take a taxi directly to the location that is written down. If you use your phone between now and the time you get to the location, either you will be killed or you will never see me again.”

It was that same slightly synthesized voice, the words fringed by just a bit of static, as if someone was speaking through a machine set on its lowest level of alteration. By the way, who uses the word
receptacle
except for maybe a junior high school vice principal or a bureaucrat with the city sanitation department? I thought better than to question him on his language usage and instead said, “I’ll do exactly as told.” For kicks, I added, “Is there a number where I can reach you if something goes awry?”

By the time I got that request out, he had already hung up. They say that jokes are all about timing, and I’m starting to think they’re right.

I stood up and walked to the green barrel to the right of the bench and saw a copy of that day’s
Traveler
lying near the top. I say near because on top of the paper were several plastic bags filled with what could politely be called dog waste. As I pulled the paper up, one bag spilled open and the, ahem, waste dripped onto the front page. Now, I’m not saying this is an inappropriate substance to appear on the front of the
Traveler;
God knows they’ve published worse. But I am saying I’d prefer it wasn’t on a paper I had to read.

I carefully flipped the paper open to page thirty-eight while trying to avoid getting dog shit on my hands. The smell wasn’t entirely pleasant. It always seems fine when it’s your own dog, but someone else’s, it’s completely gross. It wouldn’t happen this way in the movies, with the handsome hero trying to avoid the animal feces as he’s working toward saving the city — that I knew for sure.

Anyway, I got to the appropriate page, and written across the top in pen were the words “Prudential Skywalk. Telescope in the corner pointing toward Charles River and downtown Boston.” And that was that. This Phantom definitely had a flare for the dramatic.

I placed the paper back in the barrel, as ordered, making a mental note to call Peter Martin at the first available opportunity and see if we could get a handwriting analyst to look at the paper before the garbagemen came. I walked back out onto Atlantic Avenue and flagged a cab that happened to be passing by.

The Prudential Skywalk, for the uninitiated, is the pavilion on the fiftieth floor of the Prudential Center, for a while the tallest building in town, but now eight floors shorter than the nearby Hancock Tower a few blocks away. The Pru, as Bostonians tend to call it, is a remarkably ugly structure, boxy and boring and nearly a blight, except it’s our blight, and for that, the city loves it.

I got out of the cab on Boylston Street, reflexively looked straight up at the top of the building in the way that tourists from New Hampshire probably do, and took the escalator up into the mall that wraps around the skyscraper. The streets and mall passages were busy with late-arriving workers and early shoppers, and I looked around in quasi-wonderment at whether I was being followed. I assumed that the Phantom was probably already in the Skywalk, though if he was, what was with all the taxicab stuff? Why not simply sit on the bench with me in Columbus Park?

The elevator ride made my ears pop, as elevator rides generally do. At the top, I paid the nine-dollar admission fee and pictured Martin quibbling with me when I submitted the expense. He’d argue that I should have been able to talk my way in for free because I wasn’t actually going to see the view.

As I strode out onto the glass-enclosed Skywalk, the first sensation was that of light — light everywhere, streaming through the windows, reflecting off the floors, dancing along the walls, glistening off the telescopes that were pointing at the Financial District and the harbor beyond.

The second sensation was that of space — space everywhere. I don’t care how old I am, I don’t care how many times I’ve sat in offices or dined in restaurants atop high-rise buildings; whenever I do, the feeling is one of being above it all, figuratively as well as literally. The city below is minuscule, as are all the little problems of everyday life, things like traffic and litter and crowds and late appointments. High in the sky, you’re above the daily grind, free to contemplate the larger issues of life.

Which I don’t necessarily think was good at the moment, because what I had to contemplate were hardly the issues of soaring dreams. A broken marriage before the vows were ever recited, two dead women, a newspaper publisher with no balls, a serial killer who regarded me as his confidant, and some unknown would-be assailants who seemed to want me dead. I think I’d have to be soaring around the earth in a space shuttle for these problems to appear small at the moment, but maybe that’s where the Phantom would send me next.

Speaking of which, I didn’t see him. Of course, I didn’t expect him to be padding around the Skywalk with one of those stickers on the front of his jacket that says, “Hello, my name is Phantom Fiend.” But I didn’t see anyone who looked the part. Actually, I didn’t see anyone at all, which didn’t entirely thrill me.

So I went to the assigned telescope, which, as described, was tucked into the corner overlooking both the Charles River and downtown Boston. The morning sun sparkled on the calm skin of the water and flashed on the distant office towers. In the distance, the newly clean water of Boston Harbor looked nearly turquoise.

I had no change for the telescope and wasn’t of the mind to walk back into the lobby to get any, so I stood and drank in the view with my bare eyes. Vehicles in miniature dawdled down Boylston Street fifty stories below, reminding me of the Matchbox cars my father used to bring home for me when I was a kid. Down on the street, people were but insignificant little specks flitting about, and I couldn’t help but think that’s how the Phantom regarded them in life as well as in death — as insignificant, a means toward a very temporary gratification, or maybe just a step in his pursuit of fame.

I wondered if on a clear day you could see Hawaii. Probably not. And then I realized I was facing the wrong way, which I deemed to be something of a metaphor, though for what, I wasn’t exactly sure. I did know one thing for certain: it would be nice if Maggie picked up the phone and gave me a call. That said, I hadn’t actually broken a finger dialing her cell phone number, either.

Just then my phone rang. I looked at the incoming number and saw it was “Unavailable.” I answered with my trademark, clipped “Jack Flynn here.”

“I told you to go alone and you’re not,” the Phantom said.