Brian McGrory - Strangled

Brings new meaning to the USPS motto of “We deliver for you.”

“I’ve got to run, Hank.”

“So do I,” he said.

We bolted for the door. Outside, Mongillo was talking to a pair of postal workers like they were relatives. Actually, as we were leaving, one of them called out, “I promise, cousin, nothing but silence.”

At my car, I flipped open the driver’s door and climbed in beside a sleeping dog named Huck, who had crawled into the passenger seat. I flicked on the dome light, calmed my nerves for a second, gently opened the envelope that I had risked my life to get, and held its contents in my sweating hands.

I unfolded a single sheet of paper and bore down with my eyes to read it.

“Back again,” it said. “Still more to follow.”

On a separate line were the words “The Phantom Fiend.”

It was written in that same typeface as the notes I had received at the Record . In my other hand I was holding something else, something that it literally hurt me to my core to feel: the driver’s license of a thirty-four-year-old woman named Jennifer Cooper who was listed at an address on Commonwealth Avenue.

Jennifer Cooper, I said to myself, rest in peace.

I snapped open my phone, saw it was 11:35, and hit the speed-dial button for Peter Martin. He picked up on the first ring.

“Peter, you’ve got to kill the Foley story,” I yelled. “You’ve got to kill it now. It’s wrong. I’ve got the facts right here in my hand. I can write another story identifying the Phantom Fiend.”

“Who is it?” Martin asked.

“Paul Vasco. He’s definitely the killer now, I’m betting he was the killer then. I’ve got it good enough to go with.”

“You’re telling me that with all we have on Mac Foley, that he’s not guilty?”

“Peter, he’s guilty,” I replied. “He’s guilty as hell. He’s just not guilty of murder.”

Martin said, “I don’t know what the hell you mean, but I trust that you’ll make it clear in print. Now get in here and do your job.”

Mongillo was still standing on the curb with Sweeney when I threw the car into drive. It was the first time in a week that I was about to write something that I really wanted to say.

The turquoise waves rhythmically rolled against the soft shore — breaking, foaming, retreating — as I stretched out in a comfortable chaise lounge on the khaki-colored sand, drifting in and out of the most deeply satisfying slumber of my entire sheltered life. Tropical birds chirped in the distance. The gentle sun caressed the pale features of my tired face. I swear I could hear dolphins splashing offshore.

“Are you going up to the beach bar?”

That was the voice of Vinny Mongillo, who happened, not by coincidence, to be lying on the chaise beside mine.

I opened one eye, then the other.

“What’d I do that made you think I was going up to the bar?”

Vinny said, “Well, it’s hot out here. If you were hot, I thought you might be thirsty. If you were thirsty, you might be going for a drink.”

I said, “I was sleeping.”

Vinny said, “I’m just saying.”

I closed my eyes again.

“So you’re not?”

Okay, I guess this is what I get for bringing my friend and colleague on vacation to a five-star beach resort halfway around the world from where we began. It ended up that the hotel wouldn’t give me a refund on my honeymoon; the manager, who I’m betting was still on his first wife, said I had canceled too close to our arrival date. He offered me a credit instead, so here I was, accepting it — Vinny, as usual, along for the free ride. I mean, you can’t bring another girl along on your canceled honeymoon, right? Answer below.

Seventy-eight, by the way. That was the temperature of the water I’d been wondering about just before the shots rang out in the Back Bay annex of the U.S. Postal Service on that night four weeks earlier when the Record broke what may be the most closely followed story that Boston has ever known. More on that in a moment.

My reverie broken, I said to Vinny, “How long do you want to live?”

“Is that a threat?”

“No, it’s a serious question.” And I meant it.

“Just one more day than I need.”

Interesting answer, though all his answers are usually pretty interesting. I sat up and looked over at him sprawled topless in his chair, clad in a pair of flowered surfer shorts, slathered in baby oil, his skin as dark as the inside of that post office ever was, his hand wrapped around a cell phone that I’m not even sure worked this far away from home.

“Need to do what?” I asked.

He looked at me. Even his cocoa-colored eyes seemed to have darkened in the sun.

“You know — whatever. Win a Pulitzer. Start a family. Achieve some sense of inner peace.”

I was about to say something, though what, I’m not really sure, when he cut in, “That’s the problem with you, Jack. You almost had what you always wanted, and then it got taken away. Now you’re too hesitant to do something that’s not planned down to the most minute details. You’re too protective — of yourself. Maybe it’s just that you’re afraid.”

For this I got woken from a quiet reverie involving marine mammals and cockapoos. Or maybe that’s cockatoos.

“Treat life like a story,” he said. “Let it unfold. Kick your feet up and go along for the ride. Manipulate it where you can, enjoy the parts that you can’t.”

A nice thought, even if I wasn’t entirely sure what he meant.

I slammed the Paul Vasco story out of the park that night. As I sped back to the Record, I dispatched Mongillo and Hank Sweeney to Jennifer Cooper’s apartment and they found exactly what I expected, which was her body, dead about a day.

I jumped on the phone and called the Boston Police Department’s holding cell and had them put Detective Mac Foley on the line. I told him what I had, which was an intercepted letter from Paul Vasco to him. I told him what we found, which was a dead woman highlighted in the mailing. And then I told him what I believed, which was that Paul Vasco was sending him the driver’s licenses and other clues leading him to recently strangled women, just as the Boston Strangler had done with Bob Walters some forty years before.

And just like four decades previous, higher-ups in the department wanted to keep the correspondence under wraps. So Foley in turn forwarded them on to me, knowing they would generate enormous publicity and immense public pressure around the case, just at the time that the buffoonish commissioner was running for mayor.

In what may well be the most extraordinary on-the-record interview of my career, Mac Foley admitted to all this and more. He said he was so frustrated with the lack of publicity that he devised that mini-manifesto, and that when the Record didn’t immediately publish it, he stole Elizabeth Riggs’s driver’s license and sent me the note that essentially said “Or else.” He never intended to kill her. That’s what he said, anyway. I guess I believe him, but maybe not.

Foley was being hailed as a hero throughout BPD, a whistle-blower of the highest order. Soon enough, though, he’d be an indicted one. Word is that the Suffolk County District Attorney is looking at charges of evidence tampering, obstruction of justice, and interfering with an investigation. With a good lawyer, my bet is that he can keep himself out of jail.

The entire journalism world was chasing us the next day, and just when they thought they’d caught up, we came out the day after that with the results of DNA testing from Mongillo’s long-hidden knife. The irrefutable findings: Albert DeSalvo was not the Boston Strangler. More bedlam, like it couldn’t get any worse, until the morning after that when we carried the story, based on the cigarette butt that we had pulled from that dismal little room, that Paul Vasco’s DNA was tied to at least five of the murders from the early 1960s.