Brian McGrory - Strangled

I was just finishing up when Barbara, the paper’s longtime newsroom receptionist, flung the glass door open to Martin’s office and said, “You’re going to want to turn on the television.”

So Martin did, to CNN, where a rather comely reporter — a female, by the way — was standing outside Boston Police headquarters with a microphone in her perfectly manicured hand. Across the top of the screen, the slogan “The Strangler Returns” was written in bright red. On the bottom, “Breaking News” flashed in orange.

“Again, ladies and gentlemen, my Boston Police sources are telling me that Detective Mac Foley was taken into custody within the last half hour as what a high-level police official describes as, and I’m quoting him here, ‘a person of interest’ in the current Strangler investigation. Foley was one of the detectives on both this case and the strangulations from over forty years ago.

“Those same sources tell me that evidence confiscated from Foley’s house has been tied to what has been described to me as a ‘potential victim.’ He has been suspended with pay by Commissioner Hal Harrison, forced to turn over his gun, and is now being questioned by an FBI interrogator who was brought in specifically to handle this aspect of the case.

“We’ll update you as we know it. But one more time, a potentially major and blockbuster break this afternoon in the case of the current Boston stranglings. Back to you, Gray.”

The screen quickly flashed to a commercial for adult diapers, which I thought Peter Martin and Justine Steele might need at the moment. Me, I was too stunned to speak or even think, though I did wonder what kind of parents name their kid Gray.

As far as the story went, part of me felt vindicated, that my suspicions had panned out, that the cops had apparently found something in Foley’s house tying him to Elizabeth Riggs. Part of me was quietly elated that the case appeared to have been cracked, that the letters with the driver’s licenses of recent victims would stop. Yet another part of me, the one with those little shards of information knocking around my brain, felt uneasy about it all, like there was something else at play here. But the bigger part of me, maybe an embarrassing part of me, was fuming that I had just watched the whimpering end to this enormous story on a national cable network, rather than having broken it myself on the pages of my Boston Record . I got the letters. I saw the victims. I did the investigative work. I felt the guilt. This was my story, from beginning to its presumed end, and I didn’t want to see any part of it broken on TV.

Sitting there, my aggravation turned to controlled fury. I was the one who developed the intuitive suspicions about Mac Foley. I passed them along to Hal Harrison. And then he burnt me to a crisp, leaking to CNN what should have been mine. If there’s one thing a newspaper reporter hates most, and trust me, there are a lot of things a newspaper reporter hates a lot, it’s watching a story that he or she has owned get advanced by some blow-dried, over-powdered lightweight on cable TV.

Martin looked at me and said in an unusually high-pitched voice, “Jack?”

Before I could answer, my ass started vibrating, not out of anger, but from the phone call that I seemed to have been receiving. I glanced at the cell and saw it was a 702 number, so I said disgustedly, “Let me just take this first.”

I gave it my usual “Flynn here.” A woman’s voice said, “Jack, it’s Deirdre Hayes. I never got to thank you for that money you left on the counter. So, well, thank you. You’re a really sweet guy.”

I could listen to compliments all day — except today. So I said, “Deirdre, you’ve caught me in the middle of a bunch of things.” Like my complete and total career demise. “Tell me what you have?”

“You’ve got to see it, Jack.”

I was quickly losing patience, and the truth was, I had very little left to lose. “Deirdre, I’m in Boston.”

She said, “So am I. I brought the stuff out here to you. Least I could do. After my shift last night, I jumped on a red-eye through Chicago, and now I’m in the Record lobby.”

“This Record ? My lobby? I’ll be right down.”

As I turned to walk out, Mongillo, Steele, and Martin were all still mesmerized by the television coverage. I called out, “Be right back.” I paused at the door as something struck me. “Hey Vinny, did you ever get results from those DNA tests before you were arrested?”

He smiled a knowing smile at me and said, “Ah, Fair Hair, someone finally posed the question I was waiting to be asked. Good on you for doing it.”

I said, “Well?”

He picked up the remainder of his tuna sub in one of his hairy, oversize mitts. “Not yet,” he said, staring down at it. “But any minute, I hope.”

It’s probably more important to note what Deirdre Hayes wasn’t dressed in rather than what she was. She wasn’t wearing that miniskirt or the skintight tank top she had on the day before, or the dark eyeliner that made it look like she charged by the hour rather than by the drink. She was turned out on this Sunday afternoon in a pair of jeans and an expensive-looking sweater, and her fabulously wavy auburn hair was pulled back in a bun pinned to the back of her head. All of which is to say that today, she looked like someone you could introduce to your mother, which made her appearance of the day before even more of a turn-on. If this is hard to understand, that’s because it should be.

She jumped up from one of the settees that sat in the floor-to-ceiling windows and gave me a kiss on the cheek, as if we had known each other a long time, rather than exactly one day. I gave her arm a squeeze and thanked her profusely for flying all the way across the country to deliver whatever it was that she had. She explained that her father would have wanted it that way, and that I was too nice to leave that money on the table for her. I told her she was way too kind. We could have gone on and on, but I didn’t have the time. Nodding at the folder she was carrying under her left arm, I said, “So let’s take a look at what you have.”

She sat back down, and I sat down beside her. Reaching carefully into the folder, she said, “I knew there was this other box. I just knew it. So I went down into the cellar late yesterday afternoon before my shift and looked for it. Dad had another trunk that he kept down there. I had to break the lock with a hammer, and sure enough, there was a small box inside.”

By now she had pulled out a small sheath of what looked to be old papers, and she handed them to me, saying, “He never told me about these. He never told anyone in the family. But this makes it a whole lot easier to understand why he was so tortured by this case.”

She paused, her eyes welling up, and added, “I wish I had known.”

I put the stack of about nine sheets of paper on the glass-top coffee table in front of us, then picked the first one up carefully in my hands. It was a sheet of lined notebook paper, the kind you might pull out of a wired binder, and indeed, the left side had the little broken circles that showed that was exactly what was done.

The date was scrawled in black ink, in crude, adolescent penmanship, at the top of the page: “June 15, 1962.”

Below, written in the same hand, the note read, “Detective Walters, You were supposed to find Yvette before anyone else. Next time, I promise. I killed her in the kitchen. When she was dead, I dragged her into the living room. I had sex with her on the floor. Others will die. The Phantom Fiend.”

I put the sheet down and picked up the next one. On the same lined paper, in the same pen, by the same hand, the date “July 2, 1962” was scrawled at the top. Below it read, “Detective Walters, Her name is Paulina. I strangled her in her own bed. You need to go save her sorry soul.” It then gave her address, in the Dorchester section of Boston. It was signed, “The Phantom Fiend.”