I quite literally jumped out of the Navigator as Toby glided to a stop at the front door of the Boston Record. I bounded up the few stairs and into the glassed-in front lobby, where Edgar Sullivan was there to greet me.
“They don’t pay you enough, Edgar,” I said, striding past him as he leaned on the reception desk.
He began walking alongside me, keeping pace, the two of us heading side by side toward the escalator. He replied in a confiding voice, “Are you kidding me? Most guys my age are sitting on folding chairs in the rec rooms of retirement communities all over this country. They’d give their left walnut to have just five minutes of the excitement I’m having trying to help you escape Father Fate.”
I looked at him, at his neatly pressed blue blazer and tan pants that were in sharp contrast to his wrinkled face and hands, old but young, stern but happy. He was between wives, was his line, meaning he was between his fourth and fifth wives, assuming the next one would come along, which she undoubtedly would. I pictured him sitting in a neighborhood tavern after work beside a date twenty years his junior, explaining to her how he had pulled the paper’s kiester out of the fire again that day as he single-handedly tried to make this city safe for its entire female population. Retirement my ass.
“You know you’re doing one hell of a job on this, right?” I said this in all seriousness.
Edgar replied, “I’m just doing my job, Jack. It’s you who’s putting yourself at risk and writing this great stuff.”
I shook my head. “I don’t really have much of a choice. I’ve been put in the middle here. You — you could be off playing golf or throwing baseballs with the grandkids.”
“Ah, my golf game is awful and my grandkids are brats.” He hesitated, then added, “They’re good kids, actually. They’re just not into sports.”
We were at the top of the escalator now, walking toward the newsroom, still shoulder-to-shoulder, moving fast. Edgar pulled a white envelope from inside his jacket pocket. He held it out in front of us and said, “Jack, this came for you via courier about twenty minutes ago. My guys were under orders to grab me before any courier left. They did. I questioned him and he said the account was paid in cash, and he has no name, and no return address. He picked up the package from a man who he said he couldn’t identify, on a street corner in Downtown Crossing. I haven’t opened it. Maybe it’s nothing. But it’s starting to fit a pattern, and I thought you’d want to see it right away.”
He handed me the sealed envelope with my name typed on the front in small letters in a familiar font — familiar because it was the same size and font as the type on the envelope that contained Jill Dawson’s driver’s license four days before.
Four days. Seemed like four weeks, or four months, a veritable lifetime ago. You’re going to help me get the word out or other women will die. The Phantom Fiend. That’s what he wrote at the time, and I still wasn’t sure what he meant. The only thing I was sure about was that other women had died, and more women were undoubtedly about to. As a matter of fact, I was probably holding either a death sentence or a perverted death certificate in my very hand. What the “word” was, how I was supposed to help get it out, whether I could help, these were the things I didn’t know.
Until now.
We were walking into the newsroom, toward my desk. Edgar said, “Do you want me to stay with you while you open it?” He nodded toward the envelope as he spoke. “You know, could be anthrax or some other chemical.”
“Not his style, if this is even from him,” I answered. “Give me a moment with it.” He peeled off. I made my way through the maze of desks in the busy newsroom at the start of another news cycle.
Once I settled in, Martin, of course, arrived in about three nanoseconds with a whirl of questions, expectations, and instructions. I asked him to give me a minute, perhaps not as politely as I might have. Oddly enough, without questioning me, he did, and walked away.
I carefully opened the envelope with a painfully familiar sense of dread. Another correspondence, another dead woman, whether it be Jill Dawson or Lauren Hutchens or Kimberly May. Maybe I should have been invigorated to be injected this far into the biggest unfolding story in the country, but what I really felt was a gloomy sense of futility, and the worst thing a reporter can feel is futile, even if we so often are. I heard about each of these women after they were no longer alive. My reporting only brought bad news. My published words could do nothing to help them. I could only carry the distant hope that I might be bringing a sense of caution to those who would — or perhaps wouldn’t — be next.
I reached into the envelope and felt a single sheet of paper, but nothing else — meaning no disc that would show a dead woman’s body splayed out in her apartment, no driver’s license to lead us to the next victim. The sheet was folded over once. I opened it up and looked at it warily.
“Dear Mr. Flynn,” it began, again in that same printed font. “It is well known that no one was ever charged or convicted of any of the killings attributed to the Boston Strangler. What is less well known, except among a small group of experts, is that the real Boston Strangler is alive, well, and killing again today. I am the Boston Strangler. The authorities have it as wrong now as they did in 1965. You should ask them why. The answer, should they choose to give it, will be of enormous public interest.
“I will kill again, soon. If you don’t print this note, verbatim, above the fold on the front page of tomorrow’s newspaper, I will double the pace of my killing. Blood will be on your hands.
“The Phantom Fiend, also known as, The Boston Strangler.”
Okay, a couple of things are worth noting here, the first, and perhaps most obvious, is that we had a grammatically correct killer on the loose in Boston. I mean, good God, I didn’t write English as elegant as my cold-blooded correspondent, and I wrote for a living. It was as if he was writing a thank-you note to the queen.
That aside, three bodies later, he finally got around to answering the question of what he wanted from me: fame. He wanted to be on center stage in Boston, and he wanted my newspaper, the Record, to put him there. He wanted to intrigue the city with his words and hold it captive with his vicious actions. He wanted to play me. In turn, he wanted the newspaper to play its readership. He wanted me to be involved at the dead — pardon the pun — center of this story in a way reporters usually aren’t. He wanted my newspaper to do things newspapers usually don’t, in the name of a person who doesn’t do what normal people do, which is kill multiple women.
This, in short, was not a good state of affairs.
I reread the note. One hand was shadowing my eyes, while my other hand held the single sheet of paper. That hand, I realized, was trembling. He was short, firm, to the point. Maybe he was like that in real life. Lines kept jumping off the page at me — I am the Boston Strangler…You should ask them why…I will kill again, soon…I will double the pace of my killing…Blood will be on your hands.
I had Bob Walters, the former Boston Police detective at the head of the old Strangler investigation, telling me that DeSalvo was the wrong guy. Unfortunately, he was very recently deceased. I had the current killer of three women — and counting — telling me DeSalvo was the wrong guy. Unfortunately, neither was available for questions, Walters never again, and my correspondent not for the moment.
On the other side of the ledger, it was starting to seem like all the lead people who had implicated DeSalvo in the Strangler case had benefited enormously from their actions in the investigation — most notably Hal Harrison, the detective who became police commissioner and was now vying to be mayor, and Stu Callaghan, the former Massachusetts attorney general who went on to win a seat in the United States Senate.
The authorities have it as wrong now as they did in 1965. You should ask them why.
This implies that authorities knew they had it wrong some forty-plus years ago, and know they have it wrong again. My head hurt, not from too much information, but from a lack of it. What I needed were some answers from people who either weren’t shooting straight or weren’t around to speak.
“All right, long enough. What did it say? Is this going to carry the day for us tomorrow?”
That was Martin, reappearing at my desk, a bundle of nervousness and personality quirks. He was scratching at his forehead. He was tapping what looked like his Buster Brown shoes against the bottom drawer of my desk, and not in any particular rhythm. His right eye seemed to be twitching. Forget that Zen zone he would often enter. He looked like Nomar Garciaparra stepping up to the plate.
I merely shook my head in response and handed him the note to read himself, which he did, first fast, and then a second time slowly, all the while standing over me. What I was coming to learn about Martin, perhaps later than I should have, was that it was never news that made him nervous, but the lack of it. News he can handle. News he can revel in, shape, edit, then publish. It’s not having news, not having information, not having something that the competition doesn’t that makes him near crazy. For this, he will always have my respect.
“What the fuck,” he said, but he said it in a tone that betrayed an enjoyment of the decision that was to come, that decision being whether to publish the Phantom Fiend’s words, verbatim. Then he added, “Any idea if he’s sent this to any other media outlets?”
“My best read is that he’s still dealing exclusively with us. He sent me a text message on my cell phone earlier this morning saying pretty much the same thing.”
“I don’t even know how to send a text message,” Martin said. “Then again, I don’t know how to strangle a woman, either.”
With that, Martin said, “My office in twenty minutes.” As he walked away, he shook the Strangler’s note in his left hand and said, “I’m going to need this until then.”
I was on the telephone with the Las Vegas Police Department, trying to ascertain the cause of death of Bob Walters, or at least their version of the cause, when I saw them walking along the outer edges of the newsroom.
They were two middle-aged guys in ill-fitting suits with bad haircuts, meaning they were cops — detectives, actually, maybe homicide. I could spot them a mile away. It’s as if every cop over forty in the city went to the same barber, the one they had since childhood. For that matter, they all seemed to have the same tailor, the one who thought it better to keep their cuffed pants nice and short.
These two gentlemen were accompanied by one of Edgar Sullivan’s minions, who led them in silence toward Peter Martin’s office. I watched as they paused briefly outside Martin’s office before being escorted in. At that point, I couldn’t see them anymore — until, that is, they came walking back through the newsroom just a few minutes later. This time one of them was carrying an envelope in his hairy hand.
At that point, an e-mail flashed on my screen from Martin, asking to convene a meeting.
When I walked into Martin’s office, Publisher Justine Steele was already there, sitting in one of half a dozen upholstered chairs that surrounded a perfectly forgettable coffee table. Martin sat in a chair facing her. Right behind me, Vinny Mongillo walked in carrying a brown bag with what smelled like cat excrement, but ended up being an Italian cold-cut sub slathered in various oils and spices.
As he unwrapped it on the coffee table, I think I saw Justine physically gag. Martin reflexively reached for a stash of paper napkins inside a desk drawer. I said, “Jesus Christ, Vinny, it’s ten-thirty in the morning. What the hell are you doing with that crap?”
“Crap?” he replied, incredulous. “These are some of the finest cured meats that money can buy, shipped here straight from Genoa, Italy, by artisan chefs. The hell you talking about crap? And I’ve been up since five a.m., so this is like your late afternoon.”
I can’t argue with that. Actually, I probably could, but Martin interjected. “All right, we need to figure out fast how we’re going to handle this letter. Let me bring you up to date on what we’ve already done.”
I was tieless and jacketless. I don’t know why I bring that up, except for I rolled up my sleeves and let my bare forearms rest against my knees, and as I did, a little piece of pickle came flying off Mongillo’s sub and landed in the little hairs below my wrist. I flicked it on the carpet and stared at Martin.
“Jack, as soon as I got the copy of the letter from you, I, of course, flagged Justine.” Martin nodded toward Justine as if none of us knew who she was. The two of them gave each other a funny look, though not funny in the ha — ha — that — Jack — Flynn — is — sucha — riot kind of way.
“Justine, in turn, felt it important to alert Mara Laird about the existence of this new correspondence. I agreed with her on that. We got pummeled pretty hard in the Traveler today, I believe unfairly so, about not being cooperative enough with police. We want to make sure we look like we’re doing everything in our power to help them catch this killer.”
At this point, Martin was slowly easing into that Zen-like tone that he gets, the one with the exaggerated sense of calm. Justine listened to him intently. Mongillo finished the first half of his submarine sandwich and lit into the rest. I sat in still silence, starting to get slowly pissed off, though why, I wasn’t quite sure yet.
Martin continued, “Justine, do you want to fill us in on your conversation with the mayor?”
It all sounded rehearsed. Justine nodded, looked from me to Mongillo and back to me again, and said, “She’s not thrilled with this — or with us. The conversation was brief. She put me on a conference call with Hal Harrison, and the two of them said that if we publish that letter, as the writer of it wants us to do, we will push the city of Boston into a state of what they called ‘unwarranted chaos.’ ”
As she said those last two words, she looked down at a sheet of notes she had in her hand.
She continued, again looking down. “They said we would be ‘seriously impeding’ their investigation — again, their words. They said they need another day or two to” — she gazed down again here — “ ‘fully develop some promising leads.’ And in no uncertain terms, they said that if we go ahead and print that letter, we should never again expect to receive help on breaking stories from Boston PD, or, for that matter, from city hall.”
Mongillo guffawed. Or maybe he was choking on his mortadella. Either way, he said, “How could you tell if Boston PD becomes unhelpful?”
A good question, or rather a point. Martin nodded; Justine said and did nothing. Martin broke a brief but strained silence and said, “Jack, give us your take.”
So I did. I gave him exactly what he expected to get.
“I’ll be honest with you,” I began. “First, I understand that we had to turn that letter over to the cops; I just wish I had been consulted on it. Second, I didn’t realize we were consulting with the acting mayor on editorial policy and decisions. From here on in, should I plan to run all my stories past Mayor Laird to make sure they meet with her approval?”
Steele frowned. Martin was about to interject, but I continued before he got the chance.
“Third, as the Phantom Fiend points out, that blood he’s talking about will be on my hands, so I’ll be up front by saying I’m in favor of getting this thing into print as soon as possible, tomorrow being barely soon enough. Maybe we ought to even consider putting it out on the website today, though he didn’t ask us to do that, so that could screw things up.
“And fourth, there’s already blood all over the floor — Bob Walters’s blood, Kimberly May’s blood, Jill Dawson’s blood, Lauren Hutchens’s blood, Joshua Carpenter’s blood. This thing broke on a Monday. It’s Friday now. Boston PD has had a week on this, with a stream of clues provided by us. You really think another twentyfour or forty-eight hours is going to change the scope and direction of their investigation? Or do you think they’re just worried about the additional pressure?”
I paused and looked from Peter Martin to Justine Steele, then added, “And let’s assume for a moment that it’s the latter. Is it really our job to take pressure off the cops, or is it our job to put pressure on them?”
There was a moment of silence. Well, not entirely silence. Mongillo chomped on the last few potato chips, then noisily balled up the sandwich wrapper and let it sit on the table.
Finally, Steele asked, “Who’s Bob Walters?”
I explained his former position, then I shared the details of my Las Vegas trip — his drunken wife, his theories on the Strangler, and then Bob Walters being carried out of his house in a black body bag that shone brightly in the desert sun.
I haven’t even tried taking a step in a year.
Why on that one day would he have ever thought to have tried? The likely answer: he didn’t.
Mongillo, fully nourished now, piped up. “I’m with Jack on this. Since when do we hold shit back? Since when do we climb in the sack with the cops, rather than serve as a check on them, and without even a promise of exclusive information if this thing pans out? Since when do we not warn the damned public about what we know, when we know it?”
He paused, seemingly getting more wound up, then added, “This shit is life and death. This isn’t some journalism exercise about confirming a source. This is about letting women know they’re in dire danger out there.”
I added, “Hal Harrison doesn’t want people to think there’s danger because he’s running for mayor. Mara Laird doesn’t want people to think there’s danger because she is the mayor. We don’t get this letter into print, we’re not doing our jobs.”
Again, silence, until Martin asked, “You don’t think that by printing this letter, verbatim, that we’re turning over editorial control of the newspaper to a serial killer?”
A good point. But let’s face it, like it or not, what the Phantom Fiend had to say — that the Boston Strangler lives, that they had it wrong before, that they’re getting it wrong again — was news, blockbuster news, actually. And this was the same sort of journalistic issue that the editors of The New York Times and The Washington Post wrestled with in 1995 before finally deciding to publish the Unabomber’s manifesto, as he had requested. The publication led to his arrest.
I said all this, and Justine and Martin simply nodded in response, though Justine also noted that with the Unabomber case, federal officials were pushing the newspapers to publish because they had a paucity of other clues. In this case, Boston PD claimed to have other clues that needed to be pursued, and didn’t want the published letter to get in its way.
This was getting frustrating. Martin was being deferential to his boss. And his boss, Steele, was being entirely too corporate, far more cautious than she typically was, or at least used to be when she was editor. Maybe it was the lawsuits that newspapers were losing around the country. Maybe it was the diving stock price. Maybe it was her friendship with Mara Lairdo. Maybe it was the barrage of accusations that the news media was growing irresponsible and increasingly cavalier about the truth. Hell, maybe she was losing her backbone. I glanced over at Mongillo and saw that he was gripping his balled-up sandwich wrapper so tight that the veins were popping through his wrist.
Martin said to both of us, “You’ve been very helpful.”
Gee, thanks, Peter. With that, we got up and left. When we got out of earshot, Mongillo said, “I’ve got a suspected serial strangler we need to go see.”
Hey, why not? We already seemed to be getting the life choked out of us.