The Midnight Hour

by R. G. Belsky

  We were definitely talking about a lot of money here. Like Mitchell Aldrich, the cops in 1985 would have treaded very carefully around Nicholas Faron and his parents. But then again they wouldn’t have had any reason to suspect Faron.

  Now he was one of the other men in Kathleen Gallagher’s life. She’d been involved with at least three other men besides her husband.

  Aldrich. Montrose. And Faron.

  Aldrich had been cleared by the DNA evidence. It turned out that Montrose had an alibi—he was seen working by a lot of people at the time of the murders. But Faron, he was a different story. Everyone just took his word for it when he said that Gallagher never showed up that night for his scheduled tutoring session. But Gallagher claimed he couldn’t find Faron. So where was Nicholas Faron that night? Maybe he’d gone over to the Gallagher house for a final confrontation with the woman that he’d been having a secret affair with—but who now wanted to call it off and go back to her husband.

  There was something else too.

  Nicholas Faron died in 1997. The last of the four similar killings of women and their families was in 1997. Now that was interesting. I’d wondered why there’d never been any more murders after 1997. Maybe it was because the murderer died that year.

  • • •

  The background on Faron and his family turned out to be even more interesting than I expected.

  This wasn’t the first high-profile crime that he’d been connected with.

  When Nicholas Faron was twelve years old, his mother had died tragically on the estate. The story was front-page news back then, just like the Gallagher murders would be later.

  I read an old newspaper clip that I found at the Ohio Southern campus library:

  MILLIONAIRE TYCOON SHOOTS WIFE TO DEATH IN LOGAN POINT MANSION

  Dolores Faron—the wife of wealthy businessman Jonathan Faron—was shot to death by her husband last night as she attempted to enter their Logan Point mansion through a bedroom window.

  Police described the shooting as a “tragic accident.”

  They said that based on preliminary interviews and evidence at the scene, in the dark Faron had mistaken his wife for a prowler.

  Mrs. Faron died from a single shotgun blast to the head.

  A Logan Point police spokesman gave this account of the shooting:

  “Mrs. Faron arrived home late in the evening. It appears that she was heavily inebriated and disoriented about her whereabouts. Rather than using her key, she tried to gain entry to the house through the rear bedroom window.

  “Mr. Faron, hearing noises and assuming his wife was asleep in another bedroom, feared that an intruder was breaking into the house. He took out a shotgun—which he uses when hunting—and says that he went to investigate the source of the noise.

  “At that point Mrs. Faron broke a glass pane in the window, opened the window, and began trying to crawl through it into the house. Fearing for his life, he says he pointed the shotgun at the shadowy figure in an attempt to scare it away. The gun accidentally went off, killing her instantly.”

  The article went on to say that the Farons’ twelve-year-old son, Nicholas, was asleep in another part of the house at the time of the shooting.

  I showed the article to Sewell.

  “Two big, high-profile police cases in Logan Point,” I said. “That’s pretty amazing for a small town like this, don’t you think?”

  “I always heard the cops back then had some doubts about the accidental death ruling in that one.”

  “Why?”

  “There was speculation that the Farons’ marriage had been in trouble. Dolores Faron was said to be a regular at many of the nightspots in the area. She’d also been seen drinking heavily a number of times. Supposedly she had even consulted with an attorney about possible divorce proceedings against her husband. But they never found any real evidence to disprove old man Faron’s story that it was just an accident.”

  “Old man? How old was Jonathan Faron?”

  “Well, he wasn’t that old then. Probably in his late fifties. But now he must be pushing ninety.”

  “Jonathan Faron’s still alive?”

  “Yeah, he still lives up on the estate.”

  CHAPTER 19

  The Faron estate stood majestically on a hill about ten miles outside the Ohio Southern College campus, overlooking acres and acres of rolling land. There was a long, winding driveway from the road that took you past some guesthouses and a stable, where horses grazed languidly outside in the afternoon sun.

  This was where Nicholas Faron grew up. But when he died, he was a salesman for some company in Toledo. Why was he working in some sales job when he could have had all of this? Hopefully his father had some answers.

  I was expecting to meet a withered old man sitting in a wheelchair and maybe even hooked up to an oxygen tank or something. But I was wrong. Jonathan Faron looked spry and alert and much younger than a man who must have been pushing ninety. He greeted us at the front door. An attractive blond woman of about forty was at his side. He introduced her to Sewell and me as his assistant, Carrie Nash. We sat in a large living room, drinking coffee and exchanging pleasantries for a while.

  “We’re here to ask you some questions about your son,” Sewell finally said. “We think he might have had some knowledge about the Gallagher murders that happened here in 1985. Plus four other murders around the country.”

  Jonathan Faron looked shocked.

  “Mr. Faron still has a lot of trouble dealing with his son’s death,” the blond nurse said now. “Nicholas was his only child—the sole heir to the Faron family financial empire—and his loss was a terrible tragedy.”

  “Why was he working as a salesman in Toledo?” I asked. “He was the heir to a multimillion-dollar fortune.”

  “How could that possibly matter after all these years?” she asked.

  “Even though Nicholas is long dead, we’re still looking for some answers,” Sewell said. “He told police in 1985 that Thomas Gallagher never showed up for their tutoring session the night of the killings. Gallagher said he did. Now we think Gallagher may have been telling the truth, and that your son was lying. Nicholas was having an affair with the Gallagher woman. We just found that out very recently. She had broken off their relationship a few nights before the murder. That gives your son a real motive for murder.”

  Carrie Nash, the blond nurse, reached over and squeezed Faron’s hand. Their relationship had not been spelled out. But it was clear she was his emotional link to the world these days.

  “You have to understand something,” Faron said. “My son and his mother were very close. Abnormally close, I always feared. He worshiped the ground my wife Dolores walked on. I was away on business a lot in those days, and I never saw much of Nicholas. The further apart we grew, the closer he seemed to be drawn to his mother. It was almost like an incestuous relationship. He hugged her all the time. He sometimes slept in the same bed with her.

  “After my wife’s death, Nicholas was inconsolable. He just locked himself in his room and listened to music all day and night. His mother had loved all of the sixties music—from the Summer of Love and all that—and used to play it for him all the time. That was all he cared about now. That damn music. It was like she was still alive and with him in that room when he was listening to the music.”

  Music from the sixties. Like “The Midnight Hour.” I looked over at Sewell, who nodded in acknowledgment.

  “Lord knows I tried to get through to the boy. I talked to him. I bought him expensive presents. I spent time doing things with him. But nothing worked. We fought about everything. Whatever I said, he wanted to do the opposite. Going to college here in Logan Point was the last big battlefield. I wanted him to go to Princeton or Harvard. He was a brilliant boy; his test scores showed he was practically a genius. He had an IQ of 161. But he refused to do anything with his
ability. In fact, he almost flunked out of college. That’s why he was seeing a tutor, that English professor who was accused of murdering his family you talked about before. Thomas Gallagher. I made Nicholas do that because his grades were so bad. It didn’t help though. I think he deliberately got bad grades because he knew it upset me so much.

  “After he finally managed to graduate from college, things got even worse. I tried to convince him to work for me and join my business. But, as you can imagine, he didn’t want anything to do with it. Instead, he moved all around the country. Lots of places. Lots of jobs. I hardly ever saw him anymore. I tried to send him money, but he never took it. He became totally estranged from me. It was one of the great disappointments of my life. I always hoped that someday we’d be able to patch up our relationship. But then he died in the fire.

  “That night my wife died, I lost everything. I lost Dolores. But I lost my son, too. I’ve thought a million times about how I wished I could go back and change everything that happened that night. But I can’t do that. None of us can. I’m an old man now. I don’t have a lot of time left on this earth. I want to do the right thing here. I want to tell the truth. I’ve wanted to do it for a long time.”

  “Tell us everything,” Sewell said.

  He looked over at Carrie Nash. She reached over and stroked his hand. I wondered what their relationship was all about. Faron was an old man with lots of money and no heirs. Was she a gold digger? Was she part of his will? Was she glad Nicholas Faron was no longer around so she could have the rich guy for herself? I thought about all these things as I watched Carrie Nash doting on him. I also thought about how it was absolutely none of my business.

  “My wife,” Faron said, “led a very different life than me. She had very different interests. I guess the kindest way to put it is that we’d grown apart. I had my business and Dolores . . . well, she had her interests too. For a number of years, my wife had led a very active social life. She was my wife and the mother of our child, but she went out frequently without me. There were other men. A number of other men. Dolores was still quite a beautiful woman and, more importantly, I suppose, she was very rich. So she had no shortage of potential suitors.

  “I allowed this to go on. I’m not sure why I did it. Perhaps I was afraid of losing her. Perhaps I realized how close Nicholas was to her, and I didn’t want to deprive him of his mother with a nasty divorce and custody battle. But there finally came a point when she went too far. Her life had become an endless blur of parties and drinking and young boyfriends—and she was using my money to do it. She said she wanted a divorce. We had a prenuptial agreement, but she threatened to take me to court to challenge it. She wanted half my money. I don’t know how it would have turned out if she hadn’t died.”

  My God, I thought to myself, he’s going to confess to us. He’s going to tell us any second that he shot and killed his wife intentionally.

  “Dolores decided to put pressure on me for a divorce by going out with more and more men,” Faron said. “She didn’t even try to hide them from me anymore. Sometimes she even brought them home with her. It’s a big house, as you know, but it was very painful for me to realize that my wife was making love to another man under my own roof.

  “One night, a month or two before Dolores died, Nicholas walked into her bedroom. He liked to crawl into bed with her. I told Dolores it was unhealthy, but she just laughed at me. It was just one more way that she could force my hand to divorce her on her terms, I guess.

  “Only this night she had one of her boyfriends there. Nicholas walked in on his mother and this man having sex together. The shock of seeing them like that devastated him. For several days, he refused to talk to any of us. He just stayed up in his room, playing rock music—that music from the sixties that he had always listened to with his mother—very loud.

  “On the night that Dolores died she was very drunk. So drunk that she lost her keys somewhere on her rounds of the various bars. When she couldn’t open the front door, she apparently went around the back of the house and—in her inebriated state—attempted to get in through her bedroom window.

  “Nicholas was there waiting for her. I don’t know exactly what happened that night. My assumption is that he hoped to crawl into bed with her like he always used to. When she wasn’t there, he became jealous and angry. He realized she was out having a good time with other men again.

  “The gunshot woke me up. I ran in there and found Nicholas standing over Dolores’s body. He was still holding the shotgun in his hand. I took it away from him. Then I called the police. When the police arrived, I was still holding the gun. The police chief just assumed at first that it was me who pulled the trigger. I never corrected his mistake. I quickly realized he was treating it like an accidental shooting, and I felt it was better to leave it like that than to tell him the truth.

  “If Nicholas had been identified as the one who pulled the trigger that killed his mother, it would have ruined his life forever. I still loved my son. I felt there was a chance of saving him. I felt that with all my money and power I could fix whatever was wrong with him. I thought we could still have a real father and son relationship. I was wrong.

  “If I’d told the truth that day to the police, maybe Kathleen Gallagher and her two children wouldn’t have died. Or those other families you told me about. I feel that their blood is on my hands. That’s one of the reasons I’m telling you this now after all this time.”

  It was an incredible story. Not the story I’d come looking for. But it helped explain the psychological reasoning behind what now appeared to be Nicholas Faron’s actions.

  “You said this was one of the reasons you’d decided to tell the truth about what happened,” I said. “Was there another one?”

  He nodded. “My son told me once that he had had an affair with the wife of one of his professors at the college. But he didn’t tell me who it was. He told me something else, too. He said to me that the woman he’d been seeing had gotten pregnant. She told her husband it was his baby. But it wasn’t, Nicholas said. It was his baby. That was his little secret, he said. He was the father of the baby. I asked him whatever had happened to that baby. He said the mother had died and their baby girl had been adopted by someone else. He didn’t know who that was. But he said he hoped to find out someday.”

  I suddenly realized the impact of what he was saying.

  “Are you saying . . . ?”

  “I think Nicholas was the father of the Gallagher baby,” he said.

  CHAPTER 20

  We go through our lives with blinders on,” Christine Keegan said to me. “We accept what we are told and never question any of it. We close our eyes to anything that doesn’t seem to fit with the world that we have. And then one day we open our eyes. And everything is different.

  “Throughout all the ups and downs of my life—my struggles with my sexual identity, my battles with my father over a career and everything else—there was one thing I always knew. I was Christine Keegan. The daughter of Jack Keegan, the famous district attorney who always stood on the right side of the law. No matter what I did, I thought that was something no one—not even my father—could ever take away from me.

  “But then he told me first that my real father was that man Thomas Gallagher and my mother and the rest of my family were murdered. Now I find out that my real father might actually have been a serial killer responsible for the deaths of my family and all those others. I don’t know who my father is anymore.”

  We were sitting in Christine’s art gallery in Greenwich Village again. It had been several traumatic days for her as all the developments played out in the story about her father. Hell, she’d had a traumatic life. I felt badly for her. But I also wanted her story. Now that she knew the truth from her father, I wanted to be the one to break the story about her. Just like I’d broken the Nicholas Faron story.

  • • •

  My art
icle about Faron being the prime suspect as the serial killer had exploded in the media world. I was on a roll. I have a wall in my apartment (okay, I know it sounds egotistical to admit) where I post all my big front-page stories. I looked up at this latest one now with satisfaction. The huge headline, the exclusive byline. There was a picture of Faron too, which I had gotten from an old Ohio Southern yearbook. He’d been a good-looking guy. Short brown hair. Piercing eyes staring out at me from the page. I thought for a second he looked vaguely familiar. Then I realized why. He was a much younger, handsomer version of his father, Jonathan Faron.

  My reporting after the conversation with the old man had pretty much confirmed that he had to be the killer—not just of the Gallagher family, but also the other families listed in Dani’s notes.

  I found out that a Nicholas Faron was living in all four of the other cities at the same time as the killings. Maybe it was another Nicholas Faron, but I didn’t think so. Nicholas Faron wasn’t that common a name. He was there. The son of a bitch was there every time that one of those families died.

  I wondered what he’d done all of that time. He’d been a salesman for a computer company in Toledo. But his father said he’d had a lot of different kinds of jobs. Maybe he was a gas station attendant. Or a forest ranger. Or a short-order cook in a restaurant. The brilliant rich man’s son with an IQ of 161 rebelling against his father by refusing to live the kind of life he was supposed to.

  And all the time secretly playing his deadly game.

  I also tracked down pictures of the four other female murder victims besides Kathleen Gallagher. They weren’t identical twins or anything, but all of them had a similar kind of look. Then I found a picture of Dolores Faron, the Faron kid’s mother. She looked an awful lot like the five dead women too.