Strangled (14 page)

The camera casually lingered on her body the same way it did on the coffee table and the refrigerator door, as if this body was nothing more than another inanimate object in what was now a completely lifeless apartment. And then the image simply went blank, a circle appearing in the screen where the video had just played. My eyes remained frozen on it, as if at any moment anything else could appear. After a few long seconds, I clicked the video player off, placed the laptop on the passenger seat beside me, and took a couple of long, deep breaths. When I shut my eyes, I could see the woman’s face, her brown hair matted against her right temple, her sharp blue eyes, her slightly chubby cheeks. Someone’s girlfriend, someone’s daughter, someone’s friend, maybe someone’s aunt. And my bet is, I was the only living person besides her killer who knew she was dead.

I pounded out Martin’s number. He, in turn, put Edgar on another conference line, as well as Vinny Mongillo and Monica Gonsalves. She e-mailed the three of them the link, and all three watched it in silence as we stayed on the line. Well, almost silence. At the key moment, I heard Martin mutter, “What the frick.” Mongillo gasped. Poor Edgar simply said, “Dear Jesus.”

Martin cleared his throat and asked, “Okay, now what?”

I replied, “The Phantom has struck again. Problem is, we don’t know where. He didn’t give us any indication here.”

“Much as I hate to let this story get away from us, we need to get a copy of this to the cops, right?” Martin asked.

Before I could say anything, Mongillo said, “This will at least prove that we were right in reporting the likelihood of a serial killer in today’s story.”

Mongillo was right. So was Martin. I offered to get the police a copy of the e-mail, because I had to return Detective Mac Foley’s call anyway.

Martin was adopting that calm tone he gets as a story grows more chaotic. He said, “My impression is that this is a reportable event, this video. We opened the door today. We can’t shut it on more news now.”

Mongillo said, “Unless we start getting every two-bit prankster in the world. How do we prevent that, and how do we know beef from baloney?”

Martin asked, “Why the frick didn’t the person who sent this disc give us a fricking address?”

Before I could say anything, Edgar cleared his throat and announced, “He did.”

There was a moment of silence as Edgar — intentionally, I suspect — let the drama build. He finally continued, saying, “The cameraman scanned some magazines on the coffee table. He more than scanned them, he lingered on them. While you gentlemen were discussing the story, I pulled that part of the clip out, froze it, and magnified it on my screen. If you look closely at the magazines, they all contain the same name and address on the front: Kimberly May at 284 Commonwealth Avenue in Boston.” He paused, then said, “It’s in the Back Bay.”

Where was Edgar Sullivan before he came to the
Record,
at Scotland Yard? Make him a reporter and we’d be a virtual lock on a Pulitzer Prize.

“I’ll shoot it over to police,” I said.

Mongillo added, “I’m on my way to the scene. I will not get in the way. I will not get in the way. I will not get in the way.”

Rest assured, he was about to get in the way.

Martin said, “Flynn, get your ass in the seat of a plane. I don’t care what it costs.”

Those are words he had never before uttered.

“Peter, are you all right?” I asked.

His tone was calm, but his words were not. “No,” he said. “This story’s about to get a whole lot bigger before it goes away. We’ve all got to be ready for that.”

He was right, as he usually is. We hung up. I threw the car into drive. I still had one more stop to make before the long journey home.

I’m
trying to remember what life was like before cellular communications, back when we thought the earth was flat and the Celtics would forever be a dynasty and the afternoon paper would always be people’s primary, if not only, source of news. Times change. The NASDAQ, it ends up, can also go down. The Red Sox can win a World Series. And you don’t need to be particularly bright or enlightening to make it as a star political analyst on cable TV.

But where were we before the cell phone, besides listening to eight-track cartridges of Barry White and thinking they’ll never make another show funnier than
Laugh-In,
which maybe they haven’t, though that’s not really the point. The point was that out here in the Nevada desert, Verizon and all its technological marvels had instilled in me a certain amount of freedom, and I chose to use that freedom to place a call from my rental car to Mac Foley of the Boston PD.

A rather gruff gentleman answered the phone and tersely announced, “Homicide.”

“Is Detective Foley in, please?”

“No.”

Silence. And some people wonder why reporters and cops generally have such a tough time getting along. If you strip everything else away, I think it’s because reporters, by their very nature, like to communicate, to put their thoughts into words and use those words to enlighten. Cops, at least the ones inevitably assigned to answer the phones, don’t like to talk — except, maybe, to one another.

I said, “Could I leave a message for him?”

“Sure.”

I’d like to see this guy consoling the grieving relatives of a newly made victim. The odd thing is, he was probably pretty good at it, all his emotions spare but heartfelt.

“Could you tell him that Jack Flynn called.”

“Hold on.”

He didn’t, though, bother putting me on hold. Instead I heard the receiver clank on what sounded like a metal desktop. Then I heard him yell, “Hey, Mac, the asshole is on line one.”

I could vaguely hear a distant voice reply, “Which asshole?”

“The big one.”

The phone clicked and another voice came on and announced, “Foley here.”

“Jack Flynn calling.”

“Jack,” he said, his tone surprisingly upbeat, “you outdid yourself. I thought I’d seen a lot of bad, sleazy reporting in my fortysomething years on the job here, but in today’s fish wrap, you turned sleaziness into an art form.”

I said, “Thank you. God knows we try.”

Actually, that’s not really what I said, though I might have, if he had given me a chance, which he didn’t. As he spoke, the scrub of the Nevada desert washed by me on either side of my car as I barreled back down the same interstate highway destined for Bob Walters’s house to try to wring out that one last piece of information: Who had the bloody knife? I use the descriptive
bloody
not like a Brit might, but in the most literal way possible.

Foley continued, “That was really a pile of shit, Jack. You were used by some fucking kook. You violated the privacy of two different families. You needlessly scared the crap out of an entire city. And you got in the way of a police investigation that is now stalled in its tracks because you and your fucking editors are desperately trying to sell newspapers on the misery of others.

“Otherwise, great job, you asshole.”

“So you liked it?”

That I did say, though he didn’t respond. I think he was too busy disemboweling a bunny at his desk or something. I was also starting to rethink my theory that I was uniquely capable of maintaining great relationships with law enforcement types, mostly because I could relate to them so well. If this was an example of a great relationship, then Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley had a terrific marriage.

I said, “So you don’t think there’s a serial killer in town?”

He responded, “I’m not saying a fucking word to you, except that by rushing that story into print, you just validated that lunatic talk-show host. And if there is a serial killer in town, you just made it one hell of a lot harder for us to catch him — and you can quote me on that, but you won’t, because you’re too chickenshit.”

Don’t bet on that. His answer was interesting, though, the profanity aside, because it represented what former
Washington Post
editor Ben Bradlee famously described during Watergate as a “non-denial denial.” Mac Foley wasn’t actually denying the existence of a serial killer. What he was saying is that by reporting on it, I was making his job tougher — which I hate to say, or maybe I don’t, wasn’t really my concern. Because by reporting on a serial killer, I was also prompting hundreds of thousands of women in the city to take precautions, maybe saving lives. I’m not saying police wanted him to kill again, but every murder provides them with fresh possibilities for clues, and unreported or underreported murders allow police the luxury of time to find out who committed them.

I said, barely able to conceal my increasing disdain, “If you can hold yourself together for a moment, I wanted to share with you some new correspondence from the Phantom Fiend.”

Silence. I can only imagine how much he hated the fact that his investigation was dependent on a reporter for information — an investigation that would now fall under intense scrutiny because of that same reporter. Actually, I can more than imagine, because here’s what he said: “Flynn, if you try playing any games with me, if you so much as hiccup before you get me every tiny little piece of information that comes your way from whoever this is that’s calling themselves the Phantom Fiend, I’ll have you grabbed off the street and thrown in front of a grand jury so fast that you won’t be able to change out of the panties that you fucking reporters probably wear. And that’s if I’m in a good mood. If I’m in a bad mood, you’ll end up spending some time at the county jail.”

I rolled my eyes, even as I admired his ability to put his thoughts into words. This was why he wasn’t in charge of answering phones, I’m sure. I asked, “What’s your e-mail address?” He gave it to me. I told him I was sending him a video that had been mailed to the
Record,
that he could have the hard copy, and that our own investigation showed the address to be at 284 Commonwealth Avenue. We both hung up without saying good-bye.

I came around the corner of Rodeo Road and blinked at what I saw: straight ahead, several blocks away, the pulse of red and blue police lights from squad cars idling in the otherwise empty street.

I reflexively hit the gas, which I suppose isn’t something you should do with cops around. As I got closer, my fears compounded with every passing house. The police cruisers were parked in front of Bob Walters’s house, and they were parked alongside an ambulance, which, in turn, was idling next to a black van. This was not good.

As I pulled up, I saw that there was no yellow police tape, meaning the authorities weren’t treating this as a crime scene, meaning, hopefully, that maybe this was merely a matter of the sickly Bob Walters suddenly needing some medical attention and now everything inside was just fine. Couple of aspirin, maybe a catheter, and the guys in rubber gloves are on their way out the door. Or better yet, and I should probably be embarrassed for even thinking this, but maybe it was his wife in physical distress. Slouched on the kitchen table amid a puddle of vodka and glass fragments, she was hardly the picture of long-term health.

But as I left the air-conditioning of my car for the growing heat of a late desert morning, I saw with a start that the black van had the words, in sterile type,
COUNTY CORONER
on the side. Still, I thought, maybe Mrs. Walters had killed herself or died of a heart attack or sudden liver failure.

There were a couple of uniformed Las Vegas cops chatting with each other on the front lawn. A team of paramedics came walking out of the front door of the house empty-handed. Well, not entirely empty-handed. They each carried what looked to be a briefcase in their hands.

By now, sweat was dripping down my forehead and across my cheeks, and not from the heat, either. I didn’t want to look panicked, but didn’t know how to stay cool. I noticed that a few neighbors were looking on from their respective yards. I saw through the glare of the front outer door that uniformed men were crouched over, tending to something inside the front hallway. A man in a suit with a stethoscope around his neck came walking silently out the front door, got in an unmarked Ford Expedition, and drove away.

I left my notebook behind in the car. I wiped the sweat off my face with my sleeve and walked across the lawn toward the cops, who kept talking to each other. As I got near I announced, “I’m a friend of the Walterses. Can I ask what’s going on here?” Easy does it, no panic, just projecting true, heartfelt concern.

Both cops, young guys, turned to me with casual, even friendly looks on their faces.

“What’s your name?” one of them asked, not accusatorily, but so he could have a point of reference as he gave me what was undoubtedly bad news.

I told him. Before he could say anything else, the front door opened again, and a man in a white lab coat backed out of it carrying the front end of a stretcher, another man in a white coat picking up the rear. They carefully descended the two front steps, pulled on a bar at the same time beneath the stretcher, and a set of poles and wheels protruded out. They dropped the stretcher with a bounce and rolled it toward the awaiting van.

On the stretcher was a long form wrapped in a black body bag, zipped from what I assumed was head to foot, shining in the midday sun. I watched in silence, as did the two cops, watched as they slid the bag into the back doors of the van and shut them with an aching thud. Still, some part of me thought that without Mrs. Walters around, maybe it was her in the bag. After all, if it was her husband, wouldn’t she be witnessing this scene, even if only with fake tears?

My hopes were raised further when the two paramedics went walking back into the house carrying a portable stretcher. At the same time, one of the cops put his hand on my shoulder and said, “Sir, how do you know the Walterses?”

I said, “He’s a retired cop, Boston PD. I’m visiting from Boston.” There wasn’t a lie in either sentence.

The same cop put his hand on my shoulder and said, “There was an accident this morning —”

Before he could finish, the front door opened one more time. This time, a paramedic backed out lugging a stretcher, which seemed to take forever getting through the door. They came slowly down the steps. I strained my eyes. There on the stretcher was Mrs. Bob Walters, her eyes open and blinking, her lips moving, nothing more than incoherent blather coming from her mouth. I hung my head in sadness — for Bob Walters, for the victims he couldn’t help in Boston, and yeah, a little bit for this reporter who didn’t get the full benefit of his knowledge.

The young cop was still talking. “He was very frail, as I’m sure you know. He fell down the stairs sometime this morning. The mailman saw him through the front door on his daily delivery and called 911. By the time we got here, he was dead.”

Fell down the front stairs.

I haven’t even tried taking a step in a year.
That’s what Walters had said to me less than two hours before. He didn’t suddenly get out of bed and try his luck hobbling around the house. He wasn’t anywhere near the stairs under his own power. He didn’t fall by accident.

And I also knew something else: his wife had been too drunk to get herself upstairs, drag him out of bed, and push him. She probably wanted to do just that. She probably spent entire days dreaming of this scenario. But it didn’t happen like that, not here, not this morning.

Of course, I couldn’t tell the cops any of this. If I had, they probably would have thought I was some sort of kook — the word that Mac Foley had used to describe the Phantom Fiend. And if they didn’t, they would have wanted me to go downtown to answer questions, and as anyone who knows anything about Vegas knows to their core, you never want to go downtown. Especially me, especially now, when I needed to get back east to deal with the new case of Kimberly May.

So I solemnly nodded to the young cops and told them thanks. I got back in the car and carefully navigated around the emergency vehicles and the coroner’s van, which was also pulling out. I thought of Jill Dawson and Lauren Hutchens and Kimberly May, and wondered what their lives were like before they didn’t have them anymore. I thought of that poor man, Joshua Carpenter, mourning his wife in the Public Garden, wrong time, wrong place, and now he too was dead. And Bob Walters, just an old retiree with a lot of regrets and a reservoir of knowledge that he had been waiting forty years to share. I got almost all of it, but not enough.

I drove off toward the airport. Success and failure seemed inextricably intertwined, as if good and bad were forever linked. I wondered if most of life was like that, and feared that maybe it was. I had to get back to Boston to figure out how to separate the two.