Brian McGrory - Strangled

“Then maybe it’s a guy who’s not domesticated who did it.”

Eldrich didn’t reply, so Foley asked, “Shooting?”

Eldrich shook his head again. “You’ll see in a minute.”

“Robbery?”

Another head shake. “Victim’s wallet was found in the apartment with all her credit cards and seventy-two dollars inside. And she was wearing a diamond necklace that’s still on the body. No driver’s license in the wallet, but we think we have a solid identification from other sources. Brace yourself. Pretty girl, approximately thirty-two years old.”

“This isn’t going to delay my retirement, is it?” Foley asked. If Eldrich had been paying closer attention, he might have noticed a tinge of hope in the question.

“Never saw a homicide you couldn’t solve in a week. You’ll get your man and ride off into the sunset. Like a Hollywood ending.”

“Yeah, sure,” Foley said, turning and walking toward the entrance. He exchanged greetings with the two cops at the door. He saw that the first floor of the brick town house was taken up by a realty office, with advertisements in the big display window for multimillion-dollar condominiums and houses in the neighborhood. Everybody had money but him.

The stairway, he noted, was steep, narrow, and dark — easy to fall down should someone be making a rapid escape. The walls were bare. On the second-floor landing, the apartment door was open, and he walked inside to what appeared to be the living room, where a few fingerprint specialists, a videographer, and plainclothes cops had already set about their work. All stopped when he walked in to offer a greeting. Maybe he didn’t have rank, and he certainly didn’t have much money, but old Mac Foley still garnered one hell of a lot of respect.

One young cop in uniform sidled up to Foley near the door and said, “Detective, the murder scene is in the bedroom. I’ve kept it clear until you arrived. I wanted you to have first crack at it.”

He said this, Foley noted, in a funny tone of voice, not funny like ha-ha funny, but as if he wasn’t sure what had happened and was absolutely uncertain about what was to come.

Foley asked him, “Anything of note yet, Sergeant?”

“There’s a lot of note, but you’ll see for yourself.”

Then the sergeant added, “Her roommate found her. She’d been away for the long weekend. Came in half an hour ago. Apartment was unlocked. There was a light on in the decedent’s room. She poked her head inside, saw the body, ran from the building, and called 911 from her cellular telephone. I’ve had operations pull the tape recording for you.”

The sergeant paused and added, “Why don’t I show you in, Detective.”

Beacon Hill apartments, Mac Foley knew, could be either stately or cramped, depending on whether the occupant was rich or nearly rich. This one was the latter. The living room, while neat, was small and dark. The kitchen, he could tell from a quick glimpse, looked like it hadn’t been renovated in twenty years. Obviously a single-family had been cut up into apartments a long time ago, and had barely been touched ever since.

The sergeant led Foley through the living room and down a narrow hallway, past a bathroom, toward the rear of the unit. Where the hallway ended, there were doors — one to the left and the other to the right — bedrooms both. The sergeant, stopping just ahead of Foley, motioned toward the left and said simply and flatly, “In here, sir.” Then he quickly got out of the way.

Foley slowly stepped toward the door. He’d been to, what, five hundred murder scenes over his career? A thousand? He hated to admit it, but it was true: after all those years, there was a certain sameness about them. Not only were the neighborhoods usually the same, but so were the streets. The victims were almost always black, with criminal records and substance abuse problems. Witnesses were few and far between — at least for the cops. Occasionally, he’d get the random, unfortunate eleven-year-old gunned down in gang cross fire, or the young woman in a middle-class neighborhood killed by an enraged boyfriend or husband. But they were rare, which was good.

This one, he knew, would be unusual from the moment he heard the address.

“What’s her name?” Foley asked the sergeant.

The sergeant looked down at a small piece of lined paper that he pulled out of his shirt pocket. “Jill Dawson,” he replied.

Foley’s eyes widened. He stared at the sergeant for a long moment, about to say something, except he didn’t. Instead, he hurriedly opened the bedroom door, took one step, and abruptly stopped. He realized immediately that he wasn’t just looking at a crime scene, wasn’t just looking at a victim, but was also looking at his distant past.

His knees buckled slightly and he leaned quickly, reflexively, against the wall behind him, not even thinking that he might be smudging prints or compromising any other kinds of evidence.

His eyes, though, never left the corpse. She had been a young woman, pretty, with blond hair that had grown past her shoulders. She was naked from the waist down, with only a torn shirt and an unfastened bra on top, revealing her small breasts. She was propped up in her double bed on top of a white comforter, her back against the headboard, her head tilted to one side, her eyes wide open, and her legs splayed apart unnaturally, showing her pubic area. She was positioned so that when you walked into the door, she was staring straight back at you.

Foley took several long, uneasy breaths, steadied his legs, and walked toward the body. When he got closer to the bed, he saw what he had feared most. Around her neck was a ligature, a nylon stocking pulled tight, then tied into a swirling, garish bow under her chin. He saw blood in her left ear — a sure sign she had been strangled.

He’d never seen this woman before, but he’d seen the crime — too many times, forty years before, the Phantom Fiend who had come to be known as the Boston Strangler.

He pulled a pair of latex gloves from his suit pocket and walked from the side of her bed to the foot of it. There, he saw what he had thought he had noticed when he first walked into the room: an unsealed white envelope propped against her foot.

Just as he had about four decades ago, he stood bedside at a murder scene and opened an envelope. He pulled out a sheet of paper — heavy stock, not inexpensive, folded over once — and opened that up as well. With a chill, he read the crudely written words, “Happy New Year.” The letters were large and sloppy, each one of them of different size. Right beneath that, the killer had written, “Picking up where I left off…”

Foley folded up the note, placed it back in the envelope, and rested the envelope against the woman’s foot. He let his eyes roam over her body, and as he did, he felt the past crashing against the present, clouding the future — his past, his future, the commissioner’s past, the commissioner’s future, his city’s past, the city’s future. Maybe he should have felt vindicated in some odd way, but anything that had happened, anything that was about to happen, was too late to help him.

He walked toward the door and saw the uniformed sergeant still standing in the hallway, leaning against a wall.

A thought suddenly dawned on him.

“What’s the address here again?” he asked the sergeant. He knew the answer already, but he had to hear it said out loud.

“One forty-six Charles Street,” the sergeant replied.

The words were like pinpricks in his brain. The last victim of the Boston Strangler, or at least what he thought was the last victim of the Boston Strangler, had been killed in this very building forty years ago.

“Who’s been in here?” Foley asked him, nodding toward the bedroom.