When the telephone rang, I was having a dream about trying to swim across the frigid waters of the English Channel, where my dog, Baker, my wife, Katherine, and my unnamed daughter all awaited my arrival on the other side. I would have liked to have stayed asleep long enough to have our reunion.
“Hello,” I muttered into the receiver. It was pitch-black out. My head ached. I was unspeakably tired. My body still felt freezing from the river, especially my farthest extremities.
“You’re not answering your cell phone.”
It was Peter Martin. I didn’t have the wherewithal at the moment to explain that my cell phone was drying out on a radiator next to various articles of clothing, all of them soaked by a pair of men who had tried to kill me on the high seas the night before.
Instead I said, “Long story.”
He ignored that, obviously not interested in a narrative of any length. I looked at the red digits of my alarm clock, which told me it was 5:30 a.m. I had only gone to bed about three hours earlier, after persuading the nice doctors in the Massachusetts General Hospital emergency room that I wasn’t in any need of further observation and was fine to go. In the age of managed care, they seemed a little too fine with that.
“I just had an idea. We’ve got to get together and talk. I need you and Mongillo in here as soon as possible. I want him on this story with you.”
I cleared my throat and said, “Peter, it’s still yesterday, for chrissakes.”
He ignored that as well. When Peter Martin gets something in his mind, he’s not to be sidetracked. He asked, though not really in the form of a question, “Can you get here in an hour. We need an early jump on the day.”
Early jump? There were farmers in Nebraska who would roll back over at that hour. But there wasn’t any real reason for me to reply, so I simply hung up the phone.
I lay in bed thinking the same basic questions as I had a few hours earlier when I went to sleep. Who tried to kill me? Was it the same person who sent me Jill Dawson’s driver’s license? Did the killer have a change of heart and now want me dead? What was with that glare that I seemed to get from Detective Mac Foley at the end of the night, and why was he pointing me out to another cop? This may have been the most intriguing question, because it begged another: Did some cops follow me from the banquet and down to the river? And yet another: Why the hell would police investigators want me dead?
My brain was spinning in more ways than one as I pushed back the covers and struggled to my feet. I lived in a condominium on the Boston waterfront, and had a view of the harbor and ocean beyond, but I don’t recall ever having seen a sunrise quite like this one, mostly because I don’t recall ever actually seeing a sunrise here. In the distance, across a black expanse of nothingness, was the faint light of morning that quietly announced the start of a new day, one that would undoubtedly be an adventurous, perhaps dangerous, but not necessarily enlightening one.
I showered. I downed a few handfuls of dry cereal — Honey Smacks, to be precise, formerly known as Sugar Smacks before we the people became like we did about what we eat and feed our kids. I thought, of course, about how I should have been waking up in Beverly Hills to a glorious room-service breakfast with my beautiful new wife, getting ready for a week in paradise. Instead, I snapped up the cordless phone on my kitchen counter amid a funereal silence that fit my mood, if not my life, the only occasional sound the wind knocking up against the windows. I didn’t imagine it was a warm wind, either. Truth is, I didn’t imagine I’d ever be warm again. I tapped out the number to the hotel that we were supposed to be staying at in Hawaii, trying to think of a dignified way to cancel the Honeymoon Package. I really couldn’t come up with one, though it didn’t matter. The manager I needed to speak to wasn’t around.
Well, this was certainly a nice way to start the day. I checked my voice mails. There was nothing good — meaning, specifically, nothing from Maggie Kane.
So at six-ten on a March morning, I was off, the world cold in so many ways. There was somebody out there who was going to be very disappointed that I was still alive today. The key for me was to make sure I was still alive tomorrow.
That’s when I saw it on the floor of my entryway, like someone had gained access to my building and slipped it under my door. It was a manila envelope much like the one that was delivered to my desk by the Record’s security director, Edgar, the morning before — oversized, with my name printed on it in a blocky typeface. I had my overcoat on by now, over a suit coat, and I stood by the door and held the envelope in my hand for a long moment. I could already feel something of a more substantial weight inside than a sheet of paper. I didn’t like where this was going.
I carefully opened it from the top, trying to slice it as cleanly as possible in case any part of the envelope held evidence that I couldn’t see. I carefully pulled out a single sheet of folded paper. I opened it and read the note in the familiar typeface. “Back again,” it said. “More women will die.” On a separate line, the typed signature, “The Phantom Fiend.”
I stared at the words until the letters blurred and I was looking at nothing but the page they were written on. Whoever left this for me had gained access to the building, knew which apartment I lived in, and slipped it under the door, apparently fearless about being seen or caught. I wondered if the envelope was already on the floor when I stumbled through the door after my late-night swim at about two o’clock. No way of knowing. In the state I was in, and I don’t mean Massachusetts, I easily could have walked right over it. The thought crossed my mind that this envelope was a good indication that the Phantom Fiend was not one of the guys in the boat trying to kill me.
The envelope still had some heft to it, so I reached tentatively inside and felt a small rectangular placard. I had the sense of holding someone’s death warrant — or perhaps death certificate. I pulled it out slowly and saw a woman’s smiling visage on a Massachusetts driver’s license. She had dark hair parted in the middle that framed a slender face with a long jaw. Her eyes were big and blue, her mouth large in that Carly Simon kind of way. She looked like someone who knew what she wanted in this world and wasn’t afraid to spend time and capital to get it. Her name was Lauren S. Hutchens, and if she wasn’t dead already, she was probably about to be.
The license listed an address in Lexington, a wealthy suburb about a dozen miles northwest of Boston. I ran back to the phone, dialed information, and asked for a Lauren Hutchens in Lexington.
I went through that whole computerized rigmarole that usually means there is nobody by that name, and then a woman got on the line and told me I was out of luck.
“Any Hutchenses in Lexington,” I asked, trying not to sound breathless, though I was of the mind that time had suddenly become crucial.
“I have one, a Walter Hutchens on Dome Road,” she said.
I told her I’d take it, and dialed it as quickly as my fingers would allow.
Come about the fifth ring, the sleepy voice of a woman said, “Hello.” It was then I realized how early in the morning this was. Didn’t matter. I asked for Lauren. The woman hesitated and said, “She doesn’t live here.”
“Any idea how I might get in contact with her?” I asked.
“This is her mother. She moved into Boston last year. Can I help you with something?”
My heart sank. The truth was not a viable option, not the whole truth, anyway. I said, “This is Jack Flynn, a reporter for the Boston Record. I’m trying to speak with Lauren about a story I’m writing.”
A long silence, long to me anyway. I wondered if she was about to tell me that her daughter was dead, the victim of a murderer who hadn’t yet been caught. Instead she said, still sleepy, “She moved into town a year ago.”
“Do you have her number?” I asked, trying to sound neither pushy nor panicked.
“I can call her and pass along your information.”
Everyone’s suspicious of the news media these days.
I gave her my cell phone and work numbers and asked if she could call sooner rather than later. And with that, I hung up.
I dialed information again, this time asking for a Lauren Hutchens in Boston. There was an L. Hutchens on Park Drive, and I called that number but got no answer. When it kicked over to a recorded greeting, the woman’s voice, strong and resonant, sounded like it would go with the picture that I held in my hand. I asked her to call me and gave her my numbers. I had something more than a feeling that she’d never have the chance.