Brian McGrory - Strangled

And so it went for seven more letters, all of them addressed to Detective Walters, all of them signed by the Phantom Fiend, most of them alerting him to the presence of a body that had yet to be discovered, a couple apologizing that they had been found by someone else.

My head, for every obvious reason, was spinning or swimming or whatever heads do when they can barely process the staggering, earth-shaking information flowing into them. How did the news media not know about these letters? Why did police keep them quiet? Were there handwriting samples taken? Fingerprints? Anything to tie these letters to Albert DeSalvo?

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.