The Midnight Hour

by R. G. Belsky

  “What do you mean?”

  “That wife of his. She was a real piece of work. Running around with other men behind his back. I don’t know how he put up with it. Unless he didn’t know until the end.”

  “Can you remember any names of these men she was seeing?”

  “Did you ever hear of somebody named Mitchell Aldrich?”

  “The president of the college?”

  “Yeah. Mr. Golden Boy. Not long before all this happened, they were here sitting in a booth toward the back, out of sight, going at it like two teenagers in the backseat at a drive-in.”

  “Did you tell the police?”

  “I mentioned it. They didn’t seem very interested. They already had their case against Gallagher.”

  • • •

  After I left the bar, I asked for directions and then walked to the site where the murders had occurred. The Gallagher house had been torn down at some point over the years. A student union building stood at the site now. There was a coffee shop, a health food store, a fast-food restaurant, and lots of cubicles with computers in them for students to use. It all looked so ordinary. No sign that a mother and her two daughters had been slaughtered here.

  I wondered if the student union had specifically been built on this spot to wipe away any memories of the horrible crime from the campus. I wondered if Mitchell Aldrich was still the president when that happened. I wondered if maybe he did it to get rid of the crime scene itself, to make certain that no one ever found any more evidence there that might somehow involve him. On the other hand, maybe the college just decided this was the best place to build a student union. Sometimes I overthink these things.

  I was pretty much out of ideas on what to do next.

  So I went into the fast-food joint and ordered a double cheeseburger with everything on it. My adage is: when the going gets tough, the tough get hungry. There were a number of students in the place, including several extremely attractive coeds. One of them—a long-haired blonde wearing tight cutoff jeans and a flimsy T-shirt that said Ohio Southern girls do it best!—was standing in line next to my table. I studied her carefully like the inquisitive reporter I am, looking for news tips or exclusives. I wasn’t exactly sure at what precise age you officially become a lecherous old man, but I felt like I was fast approaching it.

  My cheeseburger was delicious. I took big bites of it and thought over all my options about what to do next.

  I narrowed the list down to three possibilities:

  1. I could interview everyone on the Ohio Southern campus and everyone in the town of Logan Point to see if I could find anyone who knew anything about the Gallagher murders thirty years ago. This seemed very time-consuming, probably unproductive, and—worst of all—boring as hell.

  2. I could go back to New York and track down Mitchell Aldrich, dazzle him with my interrogation techniques, and get him to confess. To the Gallagher murders, to framing Tom Gallagher, maybe even to killing Dani too. Whatever. I mean I knew that Mitchell Aldrich didn’t like Gallagher for professional reasons, that Aldrich had pushed to get the investigation that convicted Gallagher wrapped up quickly, and that Aldrich had been seen playing kissy-face with Mrs. Gallagher at the Union Tavern just a few days before she died. It was hardly overwhelming evidence that he’d killed anyone, I’ll admit. On the other hand, he was the only viable suspect I had at the moment. So there was that.

  3. Or I could continue to sit here, eating cheeseburgers and ogling pretty coeds until I either made myself sick or got arrested for loitering.

  I had pretty much decided on the third option when my cell phone rang. I looked down at the screen and saw the call was from Susan.

  “You should thank your lucky stars that you have me for an ex-wife—and that we are still on speaking terms, Gil,” Susan said when she came on the line.

  “What did you find out?”

  “Lauren Gallagher, the baby who survived the killings, disappeared into the child care system soon after the murders. No one has any idea what happened to her.”

  “Okay . . .”

  “Nicholas Faron, the student who made up the confession story, died in a hotel fire in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1997, just like you heard he did.”

  “Why exactly should I say thank you?”

  “Larry Keller. After he left Logan Point, he joined the Cincinnati police force. He only lasted a short time there. They said he was obsessed with one case . . . the Gallagher murders. They lost track of him after that. But I tried to figure out what kind of work an ex-police officer might do. Security guard or private investigator seemed to be the most likely choices. Turns out Keller is now a private investigator with an agency in Littleton, Michigan. I got an office address and a phone number for him.”

  “Jeez . . .”

  “You can say thank you now.”

  “Thank you, Susan.”

  CHAPTER 7

  It took me several hours to drive to Littleton, Michigan. It was a quiet, little town, just outside of Detroit. I could have just called Keller, I suppose, but I preferred to meet with him in person. That always made it tougher for someone to refuse to talk to you.

  Finding Larry Keller wasn’t as easy as I’d hoped. The address turned out to be just a mail drop, consisting of a wall of post office boxes. I tried the phone number, but it only gave me a voice mail for Larry Keller Investigations. I left him a message, telling him only that I was a reporter from New York City doing a story about a case he was once involved in. Then I wrote a note to Keller saying the same thing and gave it to a clerk at the mail drop, asking him to leave it in Keller’s mailbox. I put the number of the hotel where I was staying on both messages. Finally, I went back there to wait for him to call.

  The phone rang a little after eight while I was sitting on the bed and playing Angry Birds on my iPad.

  “This is Larry Keller,” the voice on the phone said. “You looking for me?”

  “Did you used to be on the Logan Point police force back in 1985?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, I’m doing a story about the Gallagher murder case, and I need your help. Do you remember it?”

  “Only every day of my life for the past thirty years,” Keller said.

  • • •

  “I was a kid then, a rookie on the Logan Point police force,” Larry Keller said. “I’d never seen anything like what was in that house. But then neither had Chief Hammond. I went in first. I saw the body of Kathleen Gallagher lying on the floor right after I got through the door. There was blood everywhere. On her. On the floor. On the walls. God, I never saw so much blood. He was sitting on the floor next to his wife’s body, holding a blood-covered kitchen knife in his hand. He kept moaning softly and mumbling something to himself—but I could never make out what it was. Hammond shouted at Gallagher to drop the knife. He did, without any hesitation or resistance. Then he looked up at us with these blank, unseeing eyes. Like he was looking right through us at something else.

  “Hammond stayed with Gallagher in the living room while I went to search the rest of the house. I found the four-year-old girl, Mary, first. She was still in her bed when her throat was cut. The body of the six-year-old, Sarah, was lying in a hallway next to the bedroom. She must have woken up, heard her sister being killed, and tried to get away. She never made it.

  “Then I heard a baby crying. I went into another bedroom and found the infant still in its crib. The killer had never touched her. I always wondered why. That’s just one of the mysteries about this case. I picked the baby up in my arms and took her downstairs. She stopped crying when I did that. I held on to her for a long time. She was a survivor. Somehow that seemed very important to me that night. I never saw that baby again. But I’ve always remembered holding her in the midst of all that death and violence.”

  We were sitting in a coffee shop on Main Street in the middle of Littleto
n. Keller was middle-aged now, of course. But he was still a good-looking man, with graying hair and a short, cropped beard speckled with gray, too. The waitress who served us was maybe eighteen at most. She and the teenaged guy behind the cash register were having an animated discussion about a concert they wanted to attend. Talking about these terrible murders in such a peaceful setting was almost surreal. But then I remembered that Logan Point seemed like a peaceful little town, too.

  “Tell me about the investigation,” I said to Keller.

  “Well, at first it seemed to be an open-and-shut case. But the more I talked to Tom Gallagher, the more doubts I began to have. There were just too many things that didn’t make sense to me.”

  He ran through them with me. Why did Gallagher make the 911 call? Why didn’t he run before the police got there? What was his motive for the murders? They were the same questions I had when I looked at the case. Larry Keller was a smart cop, probably smarter than Chief Hammond had been. I wondered how things might have turned out if Keller were in charge of the investigation thirty years ago instead of Hammond.

  “Did you tell all this to Chief Hammond?” I asked him.

  “Yes. At first, he seemed to agree with me. But then somewhere along the line—I’m still not sure exactly what happened or why—there was all this pressure from above to gather enough evidence to show that Gallagher did it. Gallagher was the killer, we were told. All you have to do is prove it.”

  “Pressure from who?”

  “The mayor’s office. The prosecutor. The college.”

  “Was a man named Mitchell Aldrich one of the people involved?”

  “Yeah, Aldrich met with Hammond one day. After that, Hammond kept me pretty much out of it. He told me they were bringing in some hotshot FBI guy from back East as an adviser to help him wrap up the case. I met the FBI guy later. He told me that the evidence against Gallagher was overwhelming, and that I didn’t need to do any more investigating. I always figured it was Aldrich who was behind that. He and the people at Ohio Southern wanted everything resolved as quickly as possible. And Aldrich had a lot of clout in those days.”

  “Did you know Aldrich might have been having an affair with Mrs. Gallagher?”

  I thought that would shock him, but it didn’t. He just stared at me across the table where we were sitting with a bemused smile on his face.

  “I became aware of that possibility somewhere along the way,” Keller said.

  “It’s a motive for murder.”

  “For a lot of people. Kathleen Gallagher had had affairs with several men. Professors. Students. To be honest, we didn’t think at the time any of that changed the facts of the case. It simply gave Gallagher more of a reason to kill his wife.”

  “So nobody ever looked at any of these other people as suspects?”

  “Not until it was too late.”

  Keller told me he’d quit the Logan Point police force after the Gallagher murders because he was disillusioned and upset about the way they’d been handled. But the case continued to haunt him throughout his entire life. He said he’d spent a lot of his own time and money over the years pursuing leads and going over and over all the evidence. The information he gathered tantalized him deeper and deeper into the case, Keller said, but it never led him to the killer. He still had no idea what really happened on that night long ago in Logan Point.

  “Is that why you quit the Cincinnati police force? Because they didn’t want to let you keep investigating the case—even on your own time?”

  “Let’s say that our priorities weren’t exactly in tandem.”

  “Maybe they were right,” I said, just playing devil’s advocate. “It’s only one murder case.”

  “Maybe more than one.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Look,” Keller said, “if Gallagher didn’t kill his family, then it means someone else did. Maybe one of the people who was having an affair with Kathleen Gallagher. Maybe somebody complete different—an intruder, a sex maniac, a band of drug-crazed hippies. Who knows? But whoever murdered her and those two little children enjoyed it. I was in that house, and I saw the results of what the killer did. This wasn’t a crime committed for money or motive or any of the usual reasons—this was a crime of passion. This guy got off on what he did. And he got away with it too. Which means . . .”

  “He probably did it again,” I said.

  Keller nodded.

  “Did you ever discover any evidence that the person who killed the Gallagher family committed any other murders?”

  “I think so. Do you remember the words that were written in blood on the wall of the living room?”

  “Beware the midnight hour,” I said.

  “What does it mean?”

  “I don’t know—just what it sounds like, I guess. The killings happened at midnight so . . .”

  “I think it’s a reference to a song. “The Midnight Hour” by Wilson Pickett. It’s one of those sixties classics—the lyrics are “I’m gonna wait ’til the midnight hour . . .” Nobody made the connection between the writing on the wall and the song at the time. I didn’t figure it out myself until a few years later. But now I think it could have been the killer’s calling card or signature.”

  “Did you ever find anything similar at any other killings?”

  “Well, it depends how you look at it. In 1989, a family named Kotchner, a husband, wife, and their young son, were murdered in a suburb of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The cops there found them in their beds—mowed down with a shotgun. Of course, it was a different MO, different weapon, there was no obvious connection to the Gallagher murders in Ohio four years earlier. Except for two things. The estimated time of the shooting was around midnight. And somebody had spray-painted something in big letters on the side of the Kotchners’ house. The words were: “My love comes tumbling down.”

  “Another song reference?”

  “From the same song. The lyric goes “I’m gonna wait ’til the midnight hour / that’s when my love comes tumbling down.”

  “So you think the killer is a music lover?”

  “I don’t know what I think. I’m not even sure the two cases are connected. My bosses on the Cincinnati police force didn’t think so. They said on my evaluation form that I was becoming obsessive and paranoid and a few other things that were even worse than that.

  “Maybe they were right. Even though I was doing a lot of investigating on my own time, I became more and more consumed by it. I never found any other cases that fit the pattern. Not that I’m sure there weren’t any. But I’ll tell you this—I don’t believe that whoever did the Gallagher killings simply stopped with them. I think he kept killing. I think he’s still out there somewhere.”

  I told him about the death of Dani Keegan.

  “Did Dani ever try to contact you about the Gallagher case?” I asked Keller.

  “No.”

  “She was a good reporter. I guess she just ran out of time. Otherwise, she would have found you, just like I did.”

  There was one more thing I wanted to find out from him. One more lead he might be able to help me with.

  “You talked about an FBI agent who came out to Logan Point back then as an adviser on the Gallagher investigation,” I said. “The big shot you said they brought in from back East to help close out the investigation. I thought I might try to track him down when I go back. See if he remembers anything, assuming he’s still alive and I can still find him. Do you by any chance remember his name?”

  “Pretty hard to forget it. He went on to be a big-time prosecutor in New York. Hell, I even read about him from time to time out here. The Manhattan DA who puts all those mobsters and corrupt politicians in jail. You know who I’m talking about, right?”

  I sure did.

  The FBI agent who thirty years ago helped send an innocent man to his death was Jack Keegan.


  Dani’s father.

  CHAPTER 8

  I think I know what Dani was doing in Logan Point,” I said to Marilyn Staley. “She wanted to break a big story, solve a big cold case. But not just any story or any cold case. This was the one case her father had failed on. He’d made a mistake and sent an innocent man to his death.”

  I told her everything I’d found out in Ohio, including what Keller had told me about Jack Keegan.

  “But we still don’t know this had anything to do with Dani’s murder,” Staley said when I was finished.

  “Maybe she uncovered something in Logan Point that wound up getting her killed.”

  “That’s just speculation.”

  “I prefer to think of it as an operative theory.”

  “We can’t write a story based on theory or speculation.”

  “So we play it completely straight. We just lay out all the facts. How the last big story Dani was working on was an attempt to solve the one case her father hadn’t been able to solve. It’s a terrific human interest feature. We let people make up their own minds. If anyone wants to connect the dots back to the murder, then they can do just that.”

  Staley thought about it for a few moments.

  “You realize you’re going to have to try to get a comment from Keegan himself before we run this story.”

  I nodded. “I want to talk to Mitchell Aldrich too.”

  “The Ohio Southern president back at the time of the murder?”

  “Yes. He’s a big real estate guy right here in New York now. He keeps popping up everywhere I look in the Gallagher case. He was one of the people who was pushing for a quick conclusion to the investigation of the Gallagher murders back then.”

  “Do you think Aldrich will talk to you?”

  “From what I heard, he likes publicity.”

  “How about Keegan? Do you know him at all?”

  “I have a connection in the DA’s office,” I told Staley.