Strangled (31 page)

I immediately thought of Bob Walters sprawled across his bed when I visited him the week before.
In this case, we held something back that was pretty big.
That’s what he’d said, and I never probed him on it. If I had, I probably would have found out about these notes days before.

All of which brought me back to H. Gordon Thomas’s line earlier that day.
You want to get it in writing, young man. That’s the best advice I can give you.

This, I assume, is what he meant. Or was it?

I did a quick calculation, and these notes seemed to further open the possibility that Detective Mac Foley could have sent the current notes to me, because he would have been in a position to know about the old ones. Or maybe he had sent the old ones as well, which brought me back to that old firebug theory of the arsonist who extinguishes his own work.

Or it could mean that Paul Vasco sent the notes then, and was sending them now. Or that the Strangler of old, if it wasn’t Vasco, is the Strangler of new.

I turned to Deirdre, who was watching me partake in these mental calisthenics and gymnastics, and I said, “I can’t thank you enough.”

“What’s it mean?” she asked.

“I have no idea, but damned if I’m not about to find out.” Then I added, “Come on upstairs for a moment. We owe you a courier fee for your services.”

Peter Martin was about to pay through the nose.

I
was staring at a blank computer screen, which is something that no writer, never mind a reporter on a deadline, likes to do, when Peter Martin parked himself in a chair at a neighboring desk and wheeled it toward mine.

Problem was, he wheeled it directly over Huck’s tail, unpleasantly rousing him from a deep slumber. Huck bolted up in shock. Martin scrambled from the chair and leapt over my desk to escape what he believed would be the unmerciful wrath of a ferocious animal, and I sat there momentarily contemplating what my life would have been like if I’d taken the LSATs.

“You’ve got to get that thing in a cage,” Martin said.

“He’s confined in the same cage that we all are,” I replied. I thought that was pretty profound. Martin eyed me like I had lost my mind.

Rather than respond, he said, “Every network, every newspaper, every blogger, every radio station, every mainstream website is going whole hog on the cop-as-murderer saga.
Newsweek
put out a story on its website quoting victims’ families from the sixties saying they always thought Mac Foley was an odd guy. FOX News is reporting that the White House is preparing an invitation to Hal Harrison for dinner with the president, in hopes of luring him into the Republican Party. CBS Radio is quoting defense lawyers all over Boston describing the shoddy investigative methods Foley used to employ in convicting other murderers. ‘Other murderers.’ They actually used that term, like Foley was already convicted.”

I shook my head. I’m the one who started all this in a typical negotiating session earlier that morning with the commissioner of the Boston Police. And here I was, just a few hours later, already sucking the fumes of other news outlets’ progress, as if I had suddenly become irrelevant to the entire tale. I didn’t like it for that reason. I liked it even less so for the nagging uncertainty that Mac Foley was truly, actually involved.

Martin continued, “We have to run big on this, every conceivable angle, and then some. We’re still printing the Phantom Fiend’s miniature manifesto. In the mainbar, which you’re writing, play up the initial suspicions of Foley, what you said to Hal Harrison to kick this whole thing off. The Elizabeth Riggs driver’s license deal. Touch on the Vinny Mongillo allegations, just in case others do. We were at this thing first; we want that to be easily apparent in our coverage.”

I only nodded. Peter Martin’s every instinct was exactly right, as they almost always are. But my instincts were holding me back, preventing me from going full bore on Mac Foley in the story. Was it because of the fact I lost the initial newsbreak, and now wanted to be counterintuitive, because in the end, that’s mostly what reporters are — at least good reporters — counterintuitive, obstinate pricks? Or was it because of my dealings with Foley, in which I never got a whiff of anything especially wrong? Or was it these little pieces that still floated around in my head, nothing ever quite coming together?

“I’ll do it,” I said.

“You don’t sound excited,” Martin responded. “Jack, this is huge. We’ve been the paper of record on this story; we have to remain the paper of record. Whomp it up. While you’re writing, I’ve got Vinny and about four others working the phones for anything we can learn about the investigation, and anything we can learn about Foley’s life and career. Let’s do it.”

He clapped his hands together and walked away, nearly skipping toward his office. I looked down at Huck; Huck looked up at me.

“I wouldn’t mind switching places with you right about now,” I told him.

He struggled slowly to his feet from his long and deserving nap. He licked my knee, then casually placed two paws on my lap as if he was about to climb onto my chair.

“I didn’t mean that literally,” I said, laughing. He groaned again as he flopped back down on the floor.

At seven o’clock, Peter Martin approached me gingerly, less because of the dog than the hour. It was deadline, after deadline, even, and he had been watching from a safe and secure distance for the past four hours as Jack Flynn — that being me — did what he did best: write stories.

Vinny Mongillo fed me great details on, among other things, the cops raiding Mac Foley’s house, and how they found Elizabeth Riggs’s wallet in the trash can of a next-door neighbor. A couple of other
Record
reporters, Linus Pershing and Cray Dalton — no one in this business is named Billy and Bobby anymore — fed me reaction from Strangler victims past and present. As I finished the story, I begrudgingly began to like it, if not for content than for style, proving that old newspaper adage that the best story a reporter’s ever done is the one he or she just wrote.

Still, I felt uneasy. I felt uneasy about the fact that Mac Foley was still being detained, even though formal charges had yet to be filed. I felt uneasy that Hal Harrison hadn’t even hinted at what those charges might be. I felt most uneasy of all about my own role, essentially leading Harrison to Foley’s house, where some incriminating evidence was discovered — or perhaps planted. Now, there’s a thought.

At that point, I was talking myself out of the story all over again, still nagged by all those disparate pieces in my head refusing to form a whole.

“You ready to let go?”

That was Martin, three paces away, looking at me expectantly. I clicked a button on my computer that transported the story from my queue to his, essentially taking it out of my hands. I should have felt good about that, another deadline successfully behind me, a blockbuster front-page story ahead. I felt anything but.

“All yours,” I said. And Martin, to his considerable credit, was as sober in his departure as he was in his arrival.

“All right, Fair Hair, I’m thinking of the thinnest-crust pizza we can find, with fresh mushrooms, maybe a little oregano, the cheese melted just perfectly so, all of it washed down with a Chianti so peppery, so authentically earthy, so absolutely Italy, that you’re going to start thinking you have a Vespa parked out front.”

That was, of course, Vinny Mongillo, parking himself in a nearby chair while he tossed one of Huck’s tennis balls high in the air, catching it effortlessly himself. “What are you thinking?” he asked.

“Of you leaving me alone.”

“Oh, come on, my little amigo. So we didn’t have it first. Get over it. We’ll have it best. We’ve got a million other things in that story that no one else will have.”

I sat in silence, watching Huck watching Vinny toss his ball.

Vinny asked, “Did you remember to put a noun and a verb in every sentence? Did you remember to put skinny Vinny’s byline right up high, preferably on top? If you did that, the story’s going to sing like a diva in Las Vegas.”

My phone rang. God bless my phone.

“Flynn here.”

“Sergeant Ralph Akin, Boston Police Department. This call is not on a recorded line, and I’m assuming yours isn’t either. We met overnight when you came to visit your colleague.”

“Hello, Sergeant. Nice to hear from you.”

“Same. Listen, I have a proposition for you. My very excellent friend, Mac Foley, is currently being detained as the commissioner and his lackeys cook up some bullshit charges. Mac would like to chat with you, in person, in the lockup.”

I asked, “What’s the proposition?”

He hesitated. I wasn’t meaning to be difficult, but sometimes I just am. Okay, more than sometimes. Sergeant Akin said, “Could you come over here ASAP and meet on the sly with Foley? That’s the proposition.”

“I’m on my way.”

“Call this number from your cell phone when you near headquarters. Enter through the rear delivery door.”

We hung up and I turned to Vinny and said, “Hold the oregano and watch the dog for me. I’ve got a little more reporting to do tonight.”

As I hustled through the gloomy newsroom, I could hear Vinny saying to himself, “Christ, a guy can starve in this life.”

As I walked up to the darkened delivery bay in the rear of Boston Police headquarters, a garage door rolled up about four feet off the ground and a lone arm extended from the dark environs, beckoning me inside. I crouched down and did as told.

Inside, Sergeant Ralph Akin, a.k.a. Ralphie, was there to greet me, with precisely none of the frivolity he had displayed earlier that day when I was meeting with Vinny Mongillo. In fact, he looked and sounded deadly serious. “Mac Foley is my friend,” he said. “He’s a fantastic cop. Ask anyone in the building. The commissioner is trying to stick it up his ass on the way out the door.”

We walked across the cavernous delivery bay, through a set of double doors, and down a narrow, fluorescent-lit hallway. Akin cut me off, flung open a door on my side of the corridor, and guided me into a tiny room that looked to be the observation area on an interrogation room on the other side of a twoway mirror.

“You’ll have some privacy in here,” Akin said. “I’ll go get Mac.” He paused at the door and said, “The brass is out to dinner. You won’t have a whole lot of time. Listen, Jack, and I think I can call you Jack. Any friend of Mongillo is good enough to be a friend of mine. Like I told you, they don’t make them any better than Mac Foley. He really needs your help.”

I didn’t say anything, though I don’t think he expected me to. In a moment he was gone.

Less than a minute later, the door opened and Mac Foley came walking in, looking far more pissed off than panicked, his expression bringing me back to the prior Monday night, at Hal Harrison’s retirement dinner, when Foley shot me an icy stare from across the crowded ballroom. Who knew then that this is where that brief relationship would lead: a clandestine meeting in the bowels of police headquarters while one party — fortunately not me — stared down the barrel of multiple murder charges.

There were four chairs in a semicircle facing the wall of glass, and Foley sat in the one closest to the door. I sat in the farthest. He said, “Jack, I don’t know what Hal Harrison is telling you I did. I don’t know yet what charges they’re going to file. But you’ve got to understand, you’ve got to believe, whatever it is they’re saying I did, I didn’t do it.”

It was odd, having a cop plead with me like this, turn to me as the ultimate arbiter, understanding the odd power that the
Record
held on this most bizarre of stories.

I said, “Detective Foley, they found Elizabeth Riggs’s purse crammed away in your neighbor’s trash can. Are you going to say this was a plant?”

He shot me a look of surprise, and then the heat faded from his eyes as he slowly gazed up and down the darkened glass, then at the tile floor in front of him, and finally at the backs of his hands.

“Whatever they’re going to say that I did, I didn’t. Please, you’ve got to trust me on that.”

He didn’t answer my question. It’s also worth noting that his line of argument was painstakingly selected. He wasn’t denying having done anything wrong, only denying doing what they were going to say he had done. It was interesting, if slightly confusing. Though maybe not.

“What are they going to say you’ve done?” I asked.

The question came out perhaps a little louder than I had intended, more aggressive than I might have meant, but truth be told, it was how I felt. Yeah, my gut told me that Boston Police Detective Mac Foley wasn’t one of the bad guys in this case. And maybe some oblique part of my mind told me the same thing. But the facts didn’t speak particularly well for him at the moment, and thus, neither would I.

“It’s a setup, Jack. They’re making me a scapegoat. They’re trying to do to me what they did to Albert DeSalvo forty years ago — pin the whole thing on someone, make all the unpleasant facts go away, and then ride it all to whatever victories they’re chasing.”

I asked, “Did you kill Jill Dawson or Lauren Hutchens or Kimberly May?” Their names rolled off my tongue like those of old friends.

He was standing now, pacing the short part of the room by the door.

“I didn’t kill anyone,” he said, though he said this while staring down at his shoes.

“Did you steal Elizabeth Riggs’s license?”

Silence. He continued to pace. He looked up at me and said, “You need to talk to Paul Vasco. Have you talked to Paul Vasco?”

“Last week,” I said, the words encased in anger as they slipped out of my mouth. I added, “You didn’t answer my question. Did you steal Elizabeth Riggs’s license?”

Abruptly, he slapped his fist against the back of his chair, sending it toppling over.

“You’re asking the wrong questions.” He yelled this more than he said it, his voice bouncing off the hard walls and glass and ricocheting around the room. “You’re asking the wrong fucking questions of the wrong fucking people.”

“Did you steal Elizabeth Riggs’s license?”

He plunked himself down in the next chair over from mine. He looked me hard in the eye. “Jack, I’ve done nothing wrong. You’ve got to talk to Vasco again. You’ve got to tell him that I’m at risk of being charged. You’ve got to get to the bottom of this story, the killings now, the killings then.”

His voice was growing panicked now, his eyes turning wild. “Please, Jack, talk to Vasco. Please.”

There was a firm knock on the door, and then it pushed open. Sergeant Ralph Akin looked at Foley and said, “The brass is back. They’re coming down to see you in a minute. I’ve got to get you back into lockup. Fast.”