I sat at my computer doing exactly as Martin had told me: writing what I knew. Vinny Mongillo stood over my left shoulder, loudly crunching on a large bag of Cheetos.
“Eating helps me think,” Vinny said defensively when I first shot him a withering look about the noise. If that had really been the case, he’d be the most thoughtful human being on the planet. I didn’t say that to him, but I wanted to.
On my screen, I described the murder scene. I wrote of the two notes that the Phantom Fiend had sent me. I asked Mongillo for more background on the Boston Strangler and included some of that as well. We had other reporters working the story who would be calling in soon from the field, including Jennifer Day, who was pressing Lauren Hutchens’s family for information and reaction, and our crime and grime reporter, Benny Simms, who was trolling his sources at Boston PD for any new nuggets.
“It’s not art, but it’ll do,” Mongillo said, now drinking a can of Diet Coke. Someone tell me how that makes any sense: a guy who just polished off a veritable burlap sack filled with processed cheese snacks was now drinking a sugar-free soda.
He added, “Get up for a minute, Fair Hair. Let the master sit down and write.”
I stared at his fingertips, which were orange from his Cheetos, and said, “Keep your goddamned mitts away from my keyboard.”
“Tough crowd in here,” he replied, wiping his palms across his plaid shirt.
At that moment, Martin materialized at my desk the way he always does, right out of thin air. He had a somber look on his face, which I initially attributed to him crashing from the high of standing up to the police commissioner. But he said in a tight voice, “We need to gather in my office. Justine’s got some concerns.”
Justine, for the record, is Justine Steele, the former editor in chief of the Boston Record, now the publisher, meaning she is the paper’s chief executive officer, the one who answers to the board of directors and the stockholders, who may or may not understand that good journalism is necessary for good profits. We’d probably find that out very soon.
“The mayor called,” she said, as the four of us sat around Martin’s table.
I wanted to correct her and say acting mayor, but for the second time in a matter of minutes, I contained myself. By the way, the office probably still seemed comfortably familiar to Steele, given that Martin hadn’t changed one single thing about it since moving in after her. If Steele had left her family pictures on the desk, Martin would have kept them there as well.
“She’s not pleased, and I have to admit, she raised some valid points,” Steele said, sighing. “This story is going to trigger widespread panic. We’re essentially telling the public that there’s a serial killer on the loose, even though police aren’t confirming there’s a connection between these two killings. On top of that, it has the potential to hinder two murder investigations.”
She paused and looked at each of us. “Are we one hundred percent sure what it is we have?”
Maybe I should have deferred to Martin to answer, but I was comfortable enough with Justine to barge right in. I had worked with her when she was editor on some of the biggest stories this paper has ever broken. So I said, “We know we got these letters. We know that one of them led us to a victim that the police weren’t aware of yet. We know that victim was strangled to death. We know the writer of these notes uses a nickname that was also used for the Boston Strangler.”
Here I paused, then added with a sigh of my own, “I’m not sure what more we need.”
“What we need is to make sure we’re doing the right thing,” Steele replied coolly. “What would your lede be?”
I said, “Right now, the lede is that a thirty-two-year-old woman was found strangled to death in her Fenway apartment yesterday morning after her driver’s license was delivered to a Boston Record reporter with a note saying, ‘More women will die.’ ”
Okay, maybe Mongillo was right. It’s not art, but good newspaper writing rarely is, and it cut right to the bone-chilling point.
I continued, “The second graph would point out that hers was the second death of a young woman in which the victim’s driver’s license was sent to the Record reporter, accompanied by a note. Both times, the note was signed ‘The Phantom Fiend’ — the same moniker that referred some forty years ago to a serial killer better known as the Boston Strangler.”
As I talked this through, I was feeling a rush of adrenaline. In a perfect world, reporters aren’t supposed to be part of the story, though the mere fact that a reporter covers a story makes him or her an inherent part. People change their actions when they know there will be public awareness. Politicians preen. Lazy bureaucrats suddenly rush. Businessmen become uncharacteristically concerned about the consumers they’re supposed to serve.
But if we printed this story, I wouldn’t merely be a part of it. I’d be dead center — pardon the term — especially given what happened on the Charles River the night before. A serial killer was communicating with the city he was terrorizing through a senior reporter at the largest newspaper in town. Sickening? Maybe. Intoxicating? Definitely. And this from someone who once found himself front and center in an international story when I was shot and wounded in what appeared to be a presidential assassination attempt. That’s an entirely different matter — though it does explain my fear of loud noises and presidents.
Steele said, “We don’t know definitively that it was a strangling, right? The cops aren’t confirming the cause of death yet. There is no coroner’s report. Things aren’t always as they seem.”
No, they’re not; she was right. But before I could reply, she said, “And the Boston Strangler — he’s dead. We know that for a fact.”
Mongillo interjected, “No, we don’t know that for a fact. Albert DeSalvo is dead, but he was never charged or convicted in any of the stranglings. There are a lot of people who never believed that he was the Boston Strangler.”
Mongillo said this with unusual intensity, much as when he corrected me on the same point the day before. His words were so heartfelt, I could even overlook the orange Cheetos crumbs that had taken residence on the side of his lips.
Steele said to Mongillo, “You’re not suggesting that the same Boston Strangler from the sixties is killing these women now?”
Mongillo shook his head slowly. A crumb fell from his face to his lap. He said, “I’m not saying yes and I’m not saying no. I’m only saying that our job is to keep an open mind. Life is strange.”
Life is strange. Tell me about it. I was supposed to be spending this day stretched out on a comfortable chaise lounge on a warm Hawaiian beach beside the woman I would love for the rest of my life — all the while with a paperback novel in one hand and a frozen strawberry concoction in the other, listening to the tranquil waves lap lazily against the Pacific shore. And here I was in Boston writing a story about a woman who apparently had been raped, then strangled in her Fenway apartment by a killer who had personally revealed his vile acts to me.
Yes, Vinny, life is definitely strange.
Steele said, “The thing that I have to keep in mind, that we have to keep in mind, is how do we do the most public good. Mayor Laird tells me that the police have made major progress in the investigation, and that publicity, and the resulting public outcry, could hamper the case.”
Martin interjected, “Or do we do the most public good by warning readers there is a serial killer in their midst who has told the Boston Record, and I quote, that ‘more women will die.’ ”
Steele shot him a look that wasn’t just cool but arctic. I mean, you could get freezer burn, that look was so cold. I had to wonder if the acting mayor had gotten to her. I’d read in the Traveler’s gossip column that the two were becoming buddies, seen together at a play one night, and in the Record luxury box at a Patriots game in December. I’ve never even sat in the Record’s damned luxury box. Did Steele leave her news judgment on the newsroom floor when she got promoted to the front office?
Martin ignored her look, or maybe he wasn’t aware of it. He added, “We could actually save lives.”
Steele replied, “Or the police could save lives by cracking the case faster without our interference.” Each word came out of her mouth with icicles hanging from them.
Then she looked at me, even sterner now. “Jack, you guys write up what you have. I want to see it before we make up our minds on this thing. It’s not an easy decision. But it’s one that I feel I have to personally make.”
Not easy? In the last thirty-six hours, I’ve had my fiancée flee the state on our wedding day. I’m on the friends-and-family list of a serial killer. And someone tried to drown me in the freezing, fetid water of the Charles River the night before. And she’s telling me that the decision she has to make in the comfortable confines of her fireplaced office is not an easy one? I made a mental note to land myself a job in management. It was starting to feel like the right time.
Of course, what we didn’t know then was that it was about to become even less easy.
I filed the story at 6:00 p.m., after taking feeds from reporters Jennifer Day and Benny Simms, neither of whom had a whole lot to offer, but just enough to help round things out. Just before I hit the Send button, Mongillo leaned over my desk, kissed the computer screen, and said, “I’ll see you in tomorrow’s paper. Please, story, please, get yourself into tomorrow’s paper.” And just like that, it was out of our hands.
I leaned back and thought about the voice mail I had received from the general manager of the Hawaiian resort that I should have been staying at that night but wasn’t. He expressed deep regret over my circumstances, and slightly less regret over the fact that there was nothing he could or would do about a refund on my significant deposit. I was, in a word, completely screwed — though I guess that’s two words.
Right now, I just craved a steak — a fat, juicy, dry-aged sirloin sizzling in its own juices on a warm plate that would also carry some home fries and grilled asparagus.
I was punchy. I was tired. I had precisely three hours of sleep the night before. And what I craved wasn’t what I needed, because what I needed was a crash course on the Boston Strangler and Albert DeSalvo, and why the latter was believed to be the former, and why it was that Vinny Mongillo didn’t think it was necessarily so. So I did something that no right-thinking reporter in any newsroom in America ever wants to do. I walked into the morgue, asked them to set me up at a table, and began my own exhaustive research.
Soon enough, a nice man by the name of Chadwick — or maybe it was Chad Wick, I really don’t know — delivered to me about a dozen musty manila folders, all of them crammed full of the yellowed news clips of the Record’s coverage of the Boston Strangler killing spree and DeSalvo’s confession about a year later.
Poring over the stories, I quickly learned this: There were eleven murders in all from the summer of 1962 through the very early winter of 1964; the first victims were women in their fifties and sixties who typically lived alone, the later victims women in their twenties and thirties; the killer often left semen on their bodies — in one case, on the victim’s chest, in another, around her mouth; sometimes the killer left garish looping bows around the victims’ necks, not unlike the one I saw earlier that day on Lauren Hutchens; sometimes the victims were ghoulishly positioned to greet investigators as they came onto the crime scenes. Again, see: Hutchens, Lauren. All of the women were strangled to death.
The city had been panic-stricken, just as Justine Steele predicted it would be again. Dog pounds were cleaned out. Locksmiths worked twenty-hour days. The streets emptied after dark. Single women set up phone trees to check on one another’s safety.
The investigation, at least on my first, brisk read, sounded like a mess, led by then state attorney general Stu Callaghan, who used his success on the Strangler case to win election to the U.S. Senate, where he remains. The Suffolk County district attorney’s office fought with the state attorney general’s office, which fought with the Boston Police, which fought with the state police. There was so much fighting I’m surprised the Strangler’s victims were the only ones who wound up dead.
Then in 1965, more than a year after the last of the killings, Albert DeSalvo, a smooth-talking laborer who was described in stories as having the odd gift of being able to slip into a crowded room completely unnoticed, confessed. He was being held in a state prison for sexually dangerous convicts at the time. He had never been a suspect. In the company of his now-famous lawyer, H. Gordon Thomas, he provided cops with vivid details of many of the crime scenes. Like Mongillo said, he was neither charged in any of the slayings nor convicted. Instead, he was sentenced to life in prison on an unrelated rape charge. He later recanted his confession when he learned his family could not profit from any of the book or movie deals that the Strangler killings had spawned.
He was stabbed to death in prison in 1973 by an unknown killer on the day before he was to meet with his lawyer to provide what he had described as an important revelation. Reading between the yellowed lines of these old stories, it didn’t look like authorities had busted a gut trying to crack Albert DeSalvo’s murder.
I opened up a folder of newspaper photographs from the era and saw a much younger version of now police commissioner Hal Harrison — then a police detective — sitting beside Senator Stu Callaghan, who was then the state attorney general, at a press conference announcing DeSalvo’s confession. I saw multiple shots of DeSalvo in various settings. I saw a shot of a Boston PD detective identified in the caption as Bob Walters walking out of a Charles Street apartment building that was the site of the last strangling attributed to DeSalvo.
That last photograph stopped me cold, though at first I wasn’t sure why. I stared at it longer and harder, harder and longer. And then it struck me — hard. Charles Street. Beacon Hill — the site of the Jill Dawson slaying. I strained my eyes to see the address above the door on the brick town house, but the picture was too grainy to clearly see the numbers. I was peering so close that my forehead banged against the table, making me reflexively jump back in surprise. I leapt up and ran over to the counter where Chad or Chadwick or Chad Wick was chortling through his nose at something he had just read in The Economist.
“Do you have a magnifying glass I could borrow?” I asked.
He shot me a look like I was an idiot. Do they have a magnifying glass? It’s their weapon of choice in the Record morgue. He opened a drawer and asked in a nasally voice, “How strong do you need?”
How do you answer that? I hesitated and replied, “Pretty strong.”
He seemed to understand and handed me a perfectly nice magnifying glass, handle first. I headed back over to my conference table and held the glass about two inches above the photograph. I immediately saw the number clear as day, even though in the photograph it was night — 146; 146 Charles Street, Boston, Massachusetts. I thought I knew what I had, but to be sure, I snapped up the phone and called up to the newsroom.
“Mongillo here.”
“Flynn here.”
“I’m on the other line.”
“Doesn’t matter. What was the address of the Jill Dawson murder earlier this week?”
“One forty-six Charles Street.”
“You’re an animal.”
“You’re my bitch.”
I’m not sure his salutation was really necessary, but I got what I needed. I riffled through the files again, looking for stories on the other murders, until I finally found one from the Fenway — 558 Park Drive, to be exact, the same location where we found Lauren Hutchens’s strangled body that morning. The modern-day killer was retracing the steps of the old Strangler — a discovery that sent one of those electric chills up my back and into my neck.
Something else kept nagging at me about that Charles Street photograph as well — something about the scene, or the people in it. I placed the magnifying glass over the shot again and scanned the sidewalk, inside the windows of the awaiting police car, the street — until there it was: the young, handsome face of one Hank Sweeney walking several paces behind Detective Walters. Hank Sweeney is a retired Boston Police homicide detective. Far more important to the point of this story, he was also a very good friend who owed me a very large favor.
“Thank you, Hank Sweeney,” I murmured to myself.
I picked up the phone again and called Hank’s cell, a number I knew by heart, even if I hadn’t called it in over a year.
He picked up on about the third ring, his voice as smooth and calm as ever.
“Hank, how’s about I buy you the best steak at Locke-Ober in thirty minutes?”
“That place is so ten minutes ago, Jack. How’s about I meet you over at Grill 23 instead?”
That’s really what he said. The guy is in his mid-seventies and he’s talking like a sophomore coed at Wellesley High. Beyond that, he’s questioning my taste in restaurants. And beyond even that, maybe he could act a little more excited about having the pleasure of my company again.
“No, Locke-Ober,” I replied. I mean, you can push me around on a lot of things, but not about restaurants. “I’ll see you there.” And just like that, I was on my way — hopefully for a lot more than a good meal.