Strangled (27 page)

On the street, I opened up Hank’s back door and beckoned the black Labrador to come with me. I hailed a cab, and the two of us settled into the backseat, sitting side by side.

That little tic was turning into a hard rap, and I was beginning to get a better handle on why.

The
aging desk sergeant at Boston Police headquarters at Schroeder Plaza barely looked up when he asked, “What do you need?”

What did I need? Where to begin. How about starting with a fresh lead on the Phantom Fiend, a way to tie the murders to the person I believed was in all probability committing them: Paul Vasco.

Then how about giving my dear colleague Edgar Sullivan the final years he deserved in peace?

How about giving me the real Peter Martin back, the one who would never tolerate the publisher checking in with city officials before deciding what to print — or, more relevant in this case, what not to print? How about letting me be just an everyday excellent reporter, and not some mouthpiece for a crazed serial murderer who seems to have emerged some forty years later?

I didn’t think this particular officer of the law was of the mind or place to give me any of this, so instead what I requested was directions to the visiting room in the station lockup. This prompted him to look up at me for the first time in our brief exchange, a weary look on his face. He said in a tone that dripped contempt, “Who wants to know?”

“My name is Jack Flynn. I’m a reporter for the
Boston Record.
”

He looked at me for a long moment, his eyes wandering across my face. His expression changed as he pulled his glasses off his face and rubbed his eyes. He said to me in a voice that reached toward politeness, “Take that elevator over there down one floor. I’ll call ahead and have an officer on duty meet you there and take you to where you’re supposed to be.”

It was three o’clock now, and as I walked across the hard floor of the wide expanse of the lobby, the sergeant called out to me, “Good luck, kid. You’re doing important work.”

I wish I could have captured that on tape, because trust me when I say that cops don’t ordinarily talk to ink-stained scribes like that.

Downstairs, a similarly aging — and respectful — sergeant met me at the elevator bank and escorted me into a windowless room furnished with only a pair of wooden benches and a row of four plastic chairs bolted to the tile floor. At the far end of the room was a pair of thick Plexiglas windows with a wall phone next to each one, just like you see on TV. I couldn’t believe that in a moment I’d be sitting there talking to Vinny Mongillo through a bulletproof partition.

Fortunately, I never did. Just as I sat down on one of the benches, without so much as a dated
People
magazine to pass the time, a heavy steel door opened in the far corner, and in walked Vinny Mongillo, shaking a fistful of peanut M&M’s out of the familiar bright yellow bag. He turned around and said to the uniformed cop walking behind him, “Thanks a million, Ralphie. And make sure you tell Jane I said she’s all wet on the mother-in-law issue.”

Ralphie said to both of us, “I’ll leave you boys to yourselves. Knock on the window when you’re done.” He laughed and added, “Nothing conjugal.” My skin crawled, but that’s okay. It was good to see Vinny, even behind bars.

Vinny raised his eyebrows at me, then sat down on a facing bench, about five feet apart from me. He finished off the last of his M&M’s without offering me any, which I guess was okay, seeing as I could buy some on the way home, and maybe he wouldn’t be going home, not tonight, anyway. He seemed infinitely more relaxed than he sounded on the phone, far more himself.

Amid his crunching I said, “Um, do you want to explain all this?”

He nodded, but as he did, he looked at the floor between us rather than at me. He crinkled up his bag and stuck it in the side pocket of his heavy khakis, his gaze never looking up. It was quiet in the room, the buzz of the overhead fluorescent lights creating the only sounds.

Finally, he said to me, “My mother was one of the Boston Strangler victims — she went back to her maiden name, and I thought I could keep it secret.” When he said this, his eyes never left the grimy patch of floor just beyond his feet.

“I know,” I replied. “And I’m sorry about that. I really am. I wish you had told me earlier.”

His head jerked up, and he looked at me for the first time since he entered the room. “How long have you known?” he asked. His eyes betrayed a sadness that I could all too well understand. Sadness, and resignation.

Before I could respond to his first question, he asked another: “Why didn’t you say anything?”

“I just found out yesterday, and I had to fly all the way to Las Vegas to learn about it. That retired BPD detective, Bob Walters, left a bunch of old files and other pilfered evidence in his garage. Your name was in there.”

Vinny nodded. “A good man,” he said. “He tried his best, just like a lot of others. Their best just wasn’t good enough.

“And you,” he added, “you’re no Vinny Mongillo, but you’re still pretty good. I figured you were going to find this out. It was just a matter of how and when.”

I wanted to talk more about Bob Walters, wanted to know what exactly he meant. But I also wanted to know why Vinny Mongillo, my Vinny Mongillo, was sitting in a Boston Police Department holding cell in connection to perhaps the most storied serial murders in the nation’s history. So for lack of a better way to put it, I asked, “Vinny, what the hell are you doing in here?”

He nodded, pursing his lips as he did, and he fell silent, his gaze again dropping to the floor. I felt a sense of dread roll down my spine. Could Vinny be charged in his own mother’s slaying? Impossible, I quickly concluded; he would have been far too young. Could he have some role in the new murders? That I wasn’t quite so certain about, even if I was.

I said, “Vinny?” The word came out more pointed than I had intended, but it seemed to snap him back to the present.

He said, “They want to charge me with receiving stolen property. The head of homicide, a guy I don’t know well, is saying that’s the minimum charge I’m going to face. He said they plan to look into what else I might have done.”

He paused, his eyes meeting mine again, and he added, “I’m a little worried about some of these bastards framing me on something.”

I swallowed hard, trying to process the little I had just learned. Questions filled my head, so I began releasing them.

“What’s the stolen property?” I asked.

He stared me square in the face and said, “The knife used to kill Albert DeSalvo.”

The knife. The infamous missing knife. The knife that held DNA evidence that could determine whether Albert DeSalvo was indeed the Boston Strangler. The knife that Hank Sweeney told me I needed to find was right under my nose all along. It could have been sitting in a Ziploc bag in the bottom drawer of a colleague’s desk, for chrissakes.

I asked, “You have the knife, as in,
the
knife?”

I’m not sure why I felt the need to ask again. In response, he nodded.

“How did you get it?”

“Detective Bob Walters gave it to me.”

Immediately, my mind clicked to my bedside interview with Walters, the grungy room, the sallow look on his face, his determination to have some things known.

I had the knife. I gave it away.

He had said that so matter-of-factly.

I gave it to the family of one of the victims.

It gave them closure. That’s a fancy word that all the victim advocates use for helping them get over the fact that the human race sucks. That knife wasn’t doing me a damned bit of good.

And then that thank-you note from Vinny to Bob Walters.

My dying grandfather, though, needs to believe that my mother’s killer has been caught and killed. He’s been very sick with cancer, and as he tries to cope with his pain, it helps him to think that DeSalvo was the murderer. That’s why your package was so helpful to him.

I finally said, “It was you who Bob Walters gave the knife to all those years ago?”

Vinny looked at me quizzically, but the look quickly faded to his prior despondence. “The problem,” he said, “is proving it. It’s not the kind of thing you get a receipt for.”

Don’t be so sure. But before I explained what I had, I asked, “How did the cops find out you had the knife?”

He shook his head and said, “Because I gave it to them. I’d been holding it all these years, preserving it, because it held all these wonderful, scientific clues in regard to DNA. I gave it to a source of mine over at the police lab because they had pulled out some evidence from the original stranglings. This source said he’d do some tests on the sly. But someone else in the lab got wind, and next thing you know, I’ve got Boston’s finest pulling me off the treadmill to take me downtown. One asshole even tried putting me in cuffs before a cop friend cut in. Evidence tampering, receiving stolen goods. All that crap.”

I said, “Bob Walters might be helping you again — from the grave.”

This prompted him to give me a look that wasn’t so much curious as annoyed. “The fuck you talking about, Fair Hair? Come on, I could find myself in some real shit here, and the last thing this paper needs right now as we get this story shoved down our throats is for one of our lead reporters on it to be carted off to prison for possible involvement in the case. I mean, the
Traveler
’s going to have a fucking field day with this.”

That they would, and for good reason. I said, “You think the higher-ups here are hassling us to quash the story?”

He nodded hard. He was the old Vinny again, animated to the point of being emotional. “They absolutely are. They hate this story, because all it can do is hurt the guys who used to be in charge — Hal Harrison and Stu Callaghan. There’s nothing good in this for them. They know it’s not going away, because these murders aren’t going away. But they don’t want the
Record
to be on a crusade. If they weaken us, we can’t be.”

He was telling me what I already knew, but it was good to hear nonetheless, reaffirming in a world that was suddenly spinning beyond control.

I said, “So they charge you with receiving stolen merchandise. They ominously say that the investigation is ‘continuing.’ Maybe they bring some witnesses before a grand jury and leak a few tid-bits to the opposition. And suddenly, the focus isn’t on them, it isn’t on the Phantom Fiend, but on the
Record
’s coverage of the Phantom Fiend.”

Vinny nodded again. “And I’m stuck in the middle.”

“Maybe not.”

He gave me that annoyed look again.

I reached into my coat pocket, pulled out the sheet of paper, and unfolded it. I began to read to him the particularly pertinent parts, concluding with, “That’s why your package was so helpful to him.”

I thought Vinny might start to cry, and I knew if he did, it wouldn’t be because I had just saved his sorry and substantial ass, but because of the paper, which is just another reason why I love him so, even if I’d never want a conjugal visit.

“I have my receipt,” he said, nearly in disbelief. “Holy shit, I have my goddamned receipt.”

He simply stared at me in wonderment, the way a dog might stare at the master that just gave him a particularly meaty bone. Then he said, “Next time I’m about to think something negative about you, which will probably be within the next thirty minutes, I’ll think of how you got this letter.”

“Good policy,” I replied.

He said, “Now, in case they charge me, did you bring bail?”

I reached deep into my pants pocket and pulled out three single dollar bills and thirty-nine cents, holding it all out to him. “You think this will cover it?”

“Forget what I said,” he replied. “You really are still a horse’s ass.”

I ignored that, which is my right, and instead gave him the
Reader’s Digest
version of the Elizabeth Riggs saga. He shook his head in disbelief and said, “This thing’s out of control.”

I changed my tone and said, “Vinny, think back for a second to this past Tuesday, to Lauren Hutchens’s place on Park Drive. When you went down to meet the cops, you never even made it to the elevator, right?”

He replied, “Right. They were just getting off.”

I asked, “Had you pressed the call button yet?”

“No.”

I stayed quiet for a moment. He was looking at me suspiciously, squinting, the wheels turning inside his head just as they were already turning inside of mine.

I said, “I never told Foley on the phone what apartment Lauren Hutchens lived in. It wasn’t on the mailbox. It wasn’t in the phone directory. It wasn’t in any information I could find online.”

I paused, looking at Mongillo sitting there looking at me in the locked confines of a Boston Police visitation room. I asked, “How did they know to come to the fourth floor?”

Mongillo said nothing. He said nothing for many long moments until he asked, “You’re sure you didn’t tell Foley?”

I nodded. “Positive. Something’s been bothering me for a while on this, and I couldn’t figure it out. It came together when I saw Foley walking with Elizabeth toward her room tonight — at the same time I got the driver’s license saying she was a Phantom victim.”

I paused, thinking of the absurdity of it all: the detective as a serial killer, then and now. Then I said, “I never told the cops, but they knew exactly where to go. How?”

Mongillo looked at me hard and said, “Fair Hair, this is a pretty fucking extraordinary allegation you’re bantering about here —”

“Let me check something,” I said, cutting him off. I pulled out my cell phone, snapped it open, and called Elizabeth Riggs. It was three in the morning, but I was pretty certain she wouldn’t be asleep yet. Hell, she and Hank were probably replaying their favorite Jack Flynn moments — or at least that’s what I wanted to think.

Elizabeth picked up on the second ring, sounding not like I woke her up.

“Jack here,” I said, all business now. “Let me ask you something. Were you supposed to meet Mac Foley earlier today instead of tonight?”

Hesitation, then she said, “Yeah. I did. Early this afternoon. We met for an interview in the hotel. But I got a call from the national desk and had to run out on something else just as it began. So he agreed to come back later.”

She paused, then asked, “Why?”