Strangled (6 page)

“Mass General Hospital,” I said. I tried saying it firmly, but the words came out as if I was being violently shaken, which I suppose, in a way, I was.

The driver, I noticed through my hazy vision, had a long, gray ponytail. He turned around and gave me a suspicious look, maintaining complete silence. He pulled back into traffic while muttering into the rearview mirror, “I knew you were up to no good.”

Then why the hell hadn’t he told me?

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.

Peter Martin
and Vinny Mongillo were already sitting in Martin’s corner office as I made my way through the darkened, empty newsroom, the Phantom Fiend’s envelope in my hand, a little bit of dread in my heart — and maybe a tinge of embarrassment and a bit of excitement over the story that was beginning to unfold.

The two of them were sitting at a small, square conference table when I walked in, Mongillo taking the last bite of a Krispy Kreme doughnut that he had pulled from a half-empty box that sat between them. Truth be told, Mongillo had lost about seventy-five pounds in the prior year and was continuing to lose weight the way Frank Sinatra shed wives, until Krispy Kreme opened its first store in Boston proper. The board of directors of Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, Inc., must set aside ten minutes at their annual meetings just to pay homage to Vinny Mongillo.

Martin pointed to the chair to his right, in an apparent invitation, though maybe it was a command. I don’t know. As I sat, he said to me, “I woke up with a jolt last night. I had this thought that you may not be the only reporter in town that the Phantom Fiend is corresponding with. And if you’re not, someone else might get this story into print before us.”

He had a point, as he often does, even if it seemed needless to make it at 6:30 a.m. I was already becoming proprietary about the Phantom Fiend. Yes, he may have been a killer, but he was
my
killer, and I’d just as soon keep it that way.

Mongillo coughed hard. I thought I saw a piece of chewed doughnut land on the table in front of me, but didn’t want to inspect it too closely for fear that I was right. I asked Martin, “What makes you think that?”

“Wichita,” he replied. “The BTK serial killer back in the seventies and eighties. He sent a letter to the local paper that mistakenly got routed to the classified ad department. He was so frustrated that his name didn’t get into print that he started writing to TV reporters, radio reporters, the cops. Anyone with a fricking PO box. They lost control of the story. I don’t want that to happen here.”

I nodded. Mongillo tried to speak for the first time since I arrived, but his voice was choked by the doughnut that he was coughing up. He began coughing again.

I ignored him and pushed the envelope toward Martin. “We’ve heard from him again,” I said.

Martin’s eyes shone bright, the same look Mongillo tends to get when you place a nicely seasoned cut of prime rib before him. He tenderly — almost lovingly — fingered the envelope and pulled out the note and driver’s license inside. I worried for a moment about contaminating potential fingerprints, but then thought that surely this killer wasn’t moronic enough not to wear gloves.

Martin stared at them both in silence. Finally, he looked up and asked me, “Is Lauren Hutchens dead?”

I brought him up to date on my phone calls and concluded, “I don’t know.”

Meantime, Mongillo was hacking and wheezing and making various guttural noises that are rarely heard beyond the hog lots of Iowa. Finally, thankfully, he stood up and left the room. Martin never even gave him a look.

In Vinny’s absence, Martin asked, “Do we knock on her door or do we call the police?”

An excellent question, one that I had contemplated on my drive into work. The safe thing to do, the responsible thing to do, would have been to call Mac Foley and tell him I was holding the driver’s license of a young woman, courtesy of the same person who sent me Jill Dawson’s license. The one problem with that scenario was that once I made that call, I would effectively lose control over the story. Foley wasn’t of the mind to play much ball with the
Record,
not yet anyway.

But equally problematic was the question of how the paper would benefit if I knocked on Hutchens’s door. What could I possibly discover that might outweigh the possibility of somehow fouling valuable evidence?

“I think we have to call the police immediately,” I said.

At that moment, Mongillo walked back into the room, a tissue in his hand and his eyes rimmed with red from his coughing fit. He sat down dramatically, turned to me, and said, “Can I see those notes he sent you?”

I slid him the most recent one and pulled a photocopy of the first note from a notebook in front of me. Mongillo read them over in silence. He made a motion with his hand, and Martin handed him Lauren Hutchens’s license.

Finally, he looked up at me.

“You know who the Phantom Fiend is, right?”

I shook my head and replied, “I’ve been trying to find that out for twenty-four hours, but the library has nothing on him.”

Mongillo looked from me to Martin and back to me. “It’s the Boston Strangler.”

The Boston Strangler? My mind began racing like a Chin-coteague pony. The most famous serial killer in United States history — though Son of Sam might have an issue with that. He inspired fear, then books, then a major motion picture starring Tony Curtis. Though I knew very little about him, I did know this: He would slip into women’s apartments all around town and in the suburbs. He would strangle them with some sort of ligature. He would occasionally leave bows around their necks. And he was gone.

Before either me or Martin could reply, Mongillo added, “The news media back then first dubbed the Boston Strangler as the Phantom Fiend. That’s what he was most commonly called at the time. It was later in the murder spree, with all the hype, that his nickname was changed.”

That might well be true, but I also knew something else about the Boston Strangler, or at least I thought I did: He was dead, the victim of a murderer in Walpole State Prison sometime in the early 1970s. Best as I could remember, no one was ever charged.

Which is what I told Vinny. Specifically, I said, “The Boston Strangler was killed, wasn’t he? I mean, he’s dead.”

Mongillo looked back at me and held my gaze.

“No,” he said, slowly, firmly, and decisively. “Albert DeSalvo was killed. That’s who you think was the Boston Strangler. That’s who the public was told was the Boston Strangler. But if you ask almost any good cop who was in the area around that time, they’ll tell you that DeSalvo was definitely not the Boston Strangler. The Strangler was never caught. He’s still out there somewhere.”

He paused here, staring at some distant point, or more likely at nothing at all. I cast a glance toward Martin. Normally, even famously pale, he now looked even whiter than usual. He was staring at Mongillo, his thoughts all but bursting out his eyes and ears.

Mongillo said, “Now he’s killing more women. He wants you to write about it. And we’ve got to get to Lauren Hutchens’s place to check it out.”

We pulled up in front of Lauren Hutchens’s address on Park Drive in the Fenway section of Boston. Fenway Park, by the way, is named for the neighborhood, not the other way around, and Park Drive is named for the Fenway, which is a park, though not Fenway Park. This explanation could probably go on all day, like the fact that South Boston and the South End are two different neighborhoods, and Roxbury and West Roxbury are nowhere near each other. Or that the West End doesn’t actually exist. It’s a Boston thing. You live in town, you don’t think anything of it.

Lauren lived — and possibly died — in a tan-colored cinder-block apartment building that stood seven stories tall, and in stark contrast to the ancient Federalist-style brick town houses all around it. This had obviously been built in the 1950s, as architectural taste had taken a decade-long hiatus while the nation had better things to think about, like family cookouts, the GI Bill, and drinking enough whole milk.

I pulled my Honda to the curb and pulled out my cell phone. “You think I should call the cops now?” I asked Mongillo.

The plan was that we were going to position ourselves as close to Lauren Hutchens’s apartment as humanly possible, call the police with the information about the note and the driver’s license, then hopefully get a firsthand view of what had happened inside.

“Hold off for just another minute,” Mongillo said, taking a long sip of his coffee, which he had insisted on stopping for on the way over. He first insisted on stopping at Starbucks, until I pointed out that a woman’s life was potentially hanging in the balance while he waited the requisite twenty minutes for some barrister, or whatever they call themselves, with a nose ring and an art history degree to handcraft his venti, no-foam, whole-milk caramel latte. He agreed to a compromise: Dunkin’ Donuts. Henry Kissinger wasn’t as good at bringing people together as I am.

We stepped out of the car onto the sun-splashed curb on a still chilly March morning. Across the street, the Fenway — the park, not the baseball field — sprawled bare and brown as far as the eye could see, a lonely place until the April rains and the May warmth would bring this city to life again.

“We have an apartment number?” Mongillo asked, looking up at the building.

“We don’t,” I replied, striding now toward the glass front doors. Inside, we looked on the row of mailboxes with names written and typed in mismatched hands and scripts, until I found “L Hutchens,” neatly scrawled in a black pen. There was no apartment number. We rang the buzzer.

I’m not sure what I expected to happen. Probably nothing. But my stomach tightened as we waited what felt like forever for her voice to come over the intercom, asking who was at the front door. Or maybe she thought she knew her visitor and she’d just buzz us inside. But neither happened. The only sounds in that vestibule were Mongillo’s labored breathing and his occasional slurps of coffee.

Another minute elapsed, and Mongillo pressed the button again. I could hear his cell phone vibrating inside his coat, but he ignored it. Still nothing. I looked at the face of my own cell phone and saw that it was 7:32 a.m. Maybe she had left for work already. Maybe she was in the shower and couldn’t hear the alert. Or maybe she was dead.

A minute later, it was my turn to buzz. Truth be told, neither Mongillo nor I knew what else to do. The plan was to call the police, but we also realized that standing here in the lobby, the cops would come, they’d deny us access to the building, and we wouldn’t see anything of the woman’s apartment, including the woman herself. The only thing we’d end up seeing would be several state workers wheeling her body into the coroner’s van. This was not a good way to start the day — not for me, but especially not for Lauren Hutchens.

“Fuck it,” I said to Mongillo, resigned. “I’ll call Mac Foley now. This isn’t doing anyone any good.”

Before he could answer, a twentysomething guy in a wool ski hat wearing a knapsack slammed open the glass doors from inside the apartment building and continued through the second set of doors outside — obviously a grad student of some sort on his way to one of the nearby universities. As I placed my foot inside the closing door, Mongillo called out to the guy, “Any idea what apartment Lauren Hutchens is in?” It was a Hail Mary question, but sometimes these things pan out.

Without stopping, he turned back and called out, “She’s my neighbor, dude. She’s in 416.”

We were in business. Of course, what kind of business, I didn’t know. We took the elevator to the fourth floor. We scouted out Apartment 416. I looked at Mongillo, standing there in the same durable tan pants he always wore, with a plaid hunting jacket wrapped around his enormous frame. He looked at me. His cell phone was vibrating again, but much to his uncharacteristic credit, he continued to ignore it.

There was no doorbell, so I knocked. Mongillo pressed his ear to the door to listen, but apparently heard nothing. Was she alive? Would a fresh-faced woman named Lauren suddenly appear at the door? If she did, what would we say? Or were we standing just a few feet from a horrendous crime scene that the criminal wanted me to know about first?

A minute or so passed and I knocked again. An older woman in the kind of cloth coat that Richard Nixon’s wife once wore appeared out of a nearby apartment. She gave us a suspicious look as she walked past us toward the elevators, but said nothing.

I tried the knob and it was locked. I stepped away from the door, pulled my cell from my coat, and said, “I’m calling.” I was surprised at how breathless I had become. Mongillo nodded. I dialed the number to the Boston PD’s homicide bureau and asked for Detective Mac Foley.

Last I saw Foley was the night before, first when he was pleasantly chatting with me, then when he was eyeing me from across the room, pointing me out to another cop. I didn’t for a second think he appreciated my unintended involvement in the Jill Dawson investigation, and he certainly wouldn’t appreciate my new found role in the Lauren Hutchens case — if, in fact, there was a Lauren Hutchens case. Most of me hoped there wasn’t. Of course, I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that some embarrassing little granule deep inside my head was excited about it all, but I tried to splash the cold water of human compassion on it.

I was told by the receptionist that Foley wasn’t available, which didn’t surprise me. Mac Foley, as I’ve said, works under the radar of public interest, even as he’s working in the public interest. Truth was, he probably also wasn’t in yet at this hour. I said, “Would it be possible to page him and let him know that Jack Flynn called. I’ve received more correspondence that may be of an urgent nature.” I left my cell phone number.

Two minutes later, as Mongillo and I lurked in the dimly lit hallway outside of Lauren Hutchens’s door, my phone rang with Detective Mac Foley on the other end of the line. I got not one second of pleasantry — no top of the morning, no how are you, no nice to meet you from the night before. This was definitely the second version of Mac Foley.

“What do you have?” he asked abruptly. Same words as Martin always uses, in the same clipped manner.

I said, “Someone slipped an envelope under my apartment door that I found this morning. Inside, a one-line note said, ‘Back again. More women will die,’ in the same typeface, with the same signature as before. It contained the driver’s license of a woman by the name of Lauren Hutchens. Phone listings have her at 558 Park Drive. I’ve tried to reach her, but with no success.”