The day dawned with a chain saw ripping through the darkness and heading toward my handsome head. I bolted upright to see who or what was attacking me, and for that matter, where I had been taken hostage, when I realized I was in a hotel room, a pretty nice one, actually, and the urgent sound emanated from my cell phone, which was lying on the nightstand. I squinted at the alarm clock’s lighted red numbers and saw it was 3:15 a.m.
“Peter, it’s the middle of the fucking night here,” I said, my voice still thick from a sleep that had barely begun.
In response, I heard no response, just silence. I said, “Hello?”
The caller cleared his throat, hesitated, and asked, “Is Jack Flynn there, please?” It was one of those deep voices that called attention to itself, like Ted Baxter’s on the old Mary Tyler Moore show, but with more of an edge.
I replied, “He is.”
Again, no response, not immediately, anyway. The caller cleared his throat again and said, “May I please speak to him?” He calls me at three-fifteen in the morning and he keeps using the word please, as if he’s being polite.
I said, “You are.”
“Great. Jack, if I may call you Jack, this is Walt Bedrock from the WBZ-TV morning show. Terrific story in today’s Record. Terrific read. We’re interested in getting you on the air so you can tell people about it.”
The name was familiar to me in the way that the names of dozens of lightweight television reporters and anchors are familiar to me, which is to say it was barely familiar at all. Put them all in a room together and you’d discover an immediate cure for even the worst TV addict.
I asked, “Didn’t I already tell people about it — in the Record?”
Again he hesitated. Sometimes you’re on someone’s wavelength, other times you couldn’t possibly be further away. Walt Bedrock and I, it was immediately apparent, were like fire and ice, though it was either too early in the morning or too late at night to tell who was which.
“Possibly,” he said, “but —”
I cut him off and asked, “Walt, if I may call you Walt, what’s your viewership over there on the WBZ-TV morning show?”
Don’t ask me why I was this angry at this hour. Maybe because of the hour, though poor Walt Bedrock didn’t know I was trying to sleep 2,800 miles and three time zones away, and he never would. More likely it was my visceral disdain for reporters interviewing reporters, an increasingly common practice among the laziest denizens of my world.
“We are watched in a hundred and ten thousand households a morning.” He said this proudly.
I replied, “The Record prints five hundred and twenty thousand papers each day, with an average readership of 1.7 people per paper. Plus there’s however many hundreds of thousands of people who read the Record online, freeloaders that they are. Why don’t I just stick with my medium and you stick with yours?”
He hesitated yet again, and then said, “Because this is TV.”
Good answer. Perfect answer. Couldn’t have imagined a better one coming from a guy who undoubtedly sits in a studio for his entire three-hour workday, reads a script, and moves his hands and facial muscles exactly like the producers tell him to through an earpiece that’s never as well hidden as they think.
I said, “Walt, I’m going to do you a favor. We’ve never met, but I’ve got the kind of face that was born to be in newspapers. Trust me, you put me on the air and you’ll shrink to sixty thousand viewers that day, most of whom would have the last name of Flynn. And it’s not a particularly desirable demographic for advertisers. Thank you anyway.”
And I hung up. No sooner than I had sprawled out anew did the phone ring again.
“Jack Flynn here,” I said.
“Jack, you’re a superstar. You’re a real fucking superstar, but you probably know that already.”
“I do. Who’s calling?”
His voice, by the way, was inexplicably strong and nasally at the same time, like a football player addicted to Afrin.
“It’s Brett. Brett Faldo. Senior producer from the Today show. Meredith and Matt asked me to call you. They absolutely love your story in today’s paper. They want to get you on the air ASAP, as in this morning. We’re not even going to make you go into the remote studio. We’ll send a crew over to your place to make this easy on everybody.”
“Who are Meredith and Matt?”
He laughed his nasally, jocular little laugh, incredulous, as if I had asked who Christ was. He said, “Just give me an address. You’re a hero, and you’re going to make this a great show.”
I’m a hero. I’m a superstar. A killer emerges from a four-decade hibernation, or maybe a new killer comes along with a passion for history, decides to contact me with a couple of cryptic notes and the driver’s licenses of a pair of dead women, and that makes me, in the eyes of the broadcast-news media world, not merely a superstar but a hero as well.
I should have anticipated this, and I guess to a certain extent I probably did. But there’s a difference between anticipating something and preparing for it. I had no set answer, which may have been just as well, because that brought me to my default answer whenever a television show asked me on as a guest, which was, in a word, no. What I had said to Walt Bedrock about having a face meant for newspapers wasn’t entirely untrue — though maybe a little bit so.
I said, “Meredith and Matt, they’re on really early, right?”
“Every day, yes.” Proud of this. Very proud.
I said, “The problem is, I don’t get up that early.”
He gave me that same laugh. I’m betting he used to give Tom Brokaw that same laugh regardless of how bad the jokes may have been. Brian Williams, that’s probably a different story; he’s supposed to be legitimately funny, though I bet Brett, his nose constantly twitching for the next story or office politics vibration, can’t tell the difference.
“Like I said,” he said, his tone clicking ever so slightly from solicitous to demanding, “we’ll make this easy on everyone. Meredith and Matt really want this to happen. I’m not going to tell them it can’t. I’ll have a crew over to your place in thirty minutes. Just tell me where.”
“I could, Brett. But the problem is, I’m not there. I’d love to help you, Meredith, and Matt out, but I’m working on a story for tomorrow’s Record. I’ve got my own job to do, Brett. As a matter of fact, I’ve got to run and do it now. Thanks for your kind offer.”
I heard him whining into the phone as I hung up.
Not ten seconds later, the phone chimed again.
“Yeah, Flynn here.”
“Jack, Regis Philbin here…”
Seriously, it was Regis Philbin. I love the man, I really do, but now was not the time to profess it. I write a story destined to rock my native Boston right to its parochial core, and this is how it begins to unwind, with a bunch of TV people wanting to piggyback on what they don’t have. And I thought it was newspapers that were in trouble. Well, okay, maybe we are as well, but at least there’s some honor to it.
As soon as I extricated myself — politely so — from that offer, I turned my phone off, rose from bed, and gazed out the window at the flashing neon up and down the Vegas strip — Paris to my left, New York — New York and the Bellagio across the street, the outdated Bally’s to my right. I wondered if my gamble would pay off today, not just for me but for women I didn’t yet know, women who were marked to die. Which is when it hit me. Most stories, truth be told, were little more than an exercise in this grand and illustrious business of reporting. If you get it, terrific, you make a splash, maybe cause some humiliation, perhaps even a resignation. Believe me, been there, done that, with mayors and governors and even a president. But this one, this one was different. People’s lives were on the line, people I didn’t know. A killer might have been playing games with these notes and driver’s licenses and all that, but it wasn’t a game at all. I was in the middle of it, but felt like a mere conduit, working on behalf of people I would probably never know.
I did know this, though: I needed a good hand, I needed it fast, or more people, myself possibly included, were destined to die.