Brian McGrory - Strangled

Nothing. So I tried the knob. It was open. I mean, think about that for a moment. The door was open — in a halfway house filled with supposedly reforming criminals. Shocked doesn’t begin to describe how I felt. Neither does pleased.

I looked at Mongillo; he held up a single fat finger, and I’m pretty sure we were both thinking the same thing. If we walked into this room, we would at that point be trespassing, and Paul Vasco, a convicted killer with a confessed lust for the act of murder, could rightfully gun us down in our woeful tracks. A jury would not only acquit him, it’d probably award him damages for the pain and suffering of having a couple of jerk reporters mucking around in his life.

I shut my eyes for a second, furiously trying to figure out a course of action. Vinny motioned for me to slowly push open the door, which I did, a crack, and Vinny called out, “Paul, it’s Jack and Vinny. We need to come in for a second. Is that all right?”

No sounds, no movement, no answer.

So I edged the door open another few inches. Mongillo looked at me and I motioned him aside. I stepped through the narrow opening, my arm first, figuring if that was shot off, I still had another. Then a leg. Same theory.

“Paul, it’s Jack Flynn. I really need to see you.”

And then my face. One hard bulb illuminated the room, and what I saw was absolutely no one. That is, until I saw the shoe resting on its side, half under the bed — a workboot, actually, with dried mud caked on the treads of its soles.

It’s funny how the mind works in a crisis, or at least under pressure. It’s funny how the dots connect faster, how the synapses fire harder, how every sense is cut and clean and grabbing at every little detail it can find, and even some it can’t. A mere shoe. Paul Vasco, I quickly understood, did not have an extra pair of shoes. You don’t come out of prison like Imelda Marcos, carrying a duffel bag full of various pairs of shoes — the loafers for a lazy Sunday afternoon, the workboots for the week, the sandals for those times at the beach when nothing else will do. No, if the shoes were here, then so was Vasco, so I called out, “Paul, I just have another quick question for you. There’s been a break in the case that I think you’re going to be interested in.”

As I said this, I eyed the boot carefully, though at the moment I wasn’t sure why. And then I was. Connected to the boot was a sock. I’m no Sherlock Holmes, hell, I’m not even Columbo, but the sock, I deducted, covered an ankle. The ankle belonged to a person hiding under the bed. The person hiding under the bed was undoubtedly Paul Vasco.

I stepped back, beckoned Vinny into the room with my hand, gave him the shut-up sign by placing a finger to my lip, and said aloud, “We missed him. He’s not here. Let’s get back to the newsroom, fast.”

Granted, I probably wasn’t ready for my Broadway debut, but I didn’t think this was bad.

I motioned Vinny out the door now. He left. I carefully stepped up on the one wooden chair in the room, summoning every bit of my athletic ability to remain as silent as I could. I leaned over and shut the door firmly.

My thinking was as follows: If I assumed that Paul Vasco was armed, and I had to assume that Paul Vasco was armed because it seemed like every single person I’d come across in the last week was armed, then I wanted to grab him while he was undertaking the awkward motion of emerging from under the bed.

Something else also pecked at my suspicions as well, and it was as simple as this: Why was Vasco hiding? And what did he have to hide?

I quite literally held my breath. Thirty seconds passed, and the boot didn’t move. Sixty seconds passed, still nothing. I let out little breaths through my nose and sucked in air through my mouth. I began to think he knew I was there. Either that or maybe sometimes a boot is just a boot, and all my deductive reasoning was out the window.

Two minutes in, I was furiously contemplating my next move. Do I look under the bed and risk being shot in the head? Do I simply grab at the boot? Do I step down from my makeshift pedestal and leave? And that’s when the boot moved, not anything subtle, but it virtually rolled over, and then a hand emerged from beneath the bed, grabbing at the top of the mattress, pulling the rest of the body out.

The form fully emerged from under the bed, facing away from me, still having no idea I was in the room. He was carrying something in his hand that wasn’t a gun. It looked like a sheath of paper. I had no time to think, let alone strategize. So what I did was pounce.

I leapt off the chair and on top of the guy’s back, slamming him down against the side of the bed, and then the floor. He let out a long, hard groan. I grabbed his neck in a headlock and slammed my fist into his gut. I’m not sure why I did this. Maybe it was all the violence that had touched me over the last week. Maybe it was rubbing off. I wouldn’t be telling the whole truth about this situation if I didn’t say it felt a little bit good.

Amid the cacophony, Vinny Mongillo flung open the door and raced into the room.

“Grab Vasco’s legs!” I yelled to him. I didn’t want the guy somehow kicking some particularly sensitive part of me while I tried to hold him down.

“I can’t,” Vinny replied.

I continued to hold Vasco down, his head facing away from me as his body furiously squirmed in an attempt to get free. “Why the hell not?” I asked, looking up at Mongillo.

“Because Vasco’s not here. This isn’t him.”

I pushed the guy away from me, down onto the floor. He had long, stringy hair, an unkempt beard that was born of nothing more than laziness, and needle marks up and down his skeletal arms. He was looking at me wide-eyed, truly frightened, and he blurted out in a panicked tone, “Vasco’s gone. He told me I could take some of this stuff. He really did.” I noticed for the first time that the sheath of papers, now strewn across the floor, was a collection of pornographic photos that the guy had obviously pulled off the wall.

I clenched my fist, raised it in the air, and said, “Where is he? Where’s Vasco?”

The guy blinked long and hard in anticipated pain and said, “He took the train. I don’t know where he went.”

“How do you know he was on the train?”

“I was with him when he left.”

The guy was still on the ground, his head raised a few inches off the filthy floor. I was kneeling above him. Mongillo stood behind me.

Mongillo barked, “When?”

“This morning. We went to the train station this morning. We were supposed to be going to work together for the first day, and he said he had somewhere else he needed to go.”

“Which train station?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

I clenched my fist harder, causing him to flinch. They probably don’t teach this interview technique at Columbia University’s ever-famous journalism graduate school, but nor do they probably teach young reporters-to-be what they’re supposed to do when everyone around them keeps dying. Or maybe they do; I don’t really know. I barely got a bachelor’s degree.

I asked, “How the fuck do you not know?”

“I don’t know this city, man. I don’t. I’m from Detroit. I really don’t know.”

Mongillo and I remained silent for a moment, both our minds rushing to devise our next step. In the quiet, I glanced over at the wall that held the photographs of Jill Dawson, Lauren Hutchens, and Kimberly May, and saw with a start that their pictures were no longer there. I scanned the floor quickly, and they weren’t there either. I don’t know why this was important to me, the fact these pictures were missing, but it was.

“You’re coming with us,” I said, grabbing him by the front of his dirty white T-shirt and lifting him up.