The Midnight Hour

by R. G. Belsky

  I quoted a prominent psychiatrist in my story who said it appeared as if Faron had an intense—maybe even sick—relationship with his mother.

  “Faron fell in love with all of these women just like he fell in love with his own mother a long time ago as a young boy,” the psychiatrist said. “I believe he was hoping one of these women would take the place of his mother. But they were leaving him just like his mother had done. So every time that happened, he simply wiped them out and started all over again. He was angry because he couldn’t have them, the same way he couldn’t have his mother.”

  The more I thought about it, the more sense it made. Kathleen Gallagher had broken it off with Faron before she was murdered. Had the others all done the same thing? I was willing to bet now that they had.

  He hadn’t killed anybody though in Toledo, the last place he lived. Or had he? I checked with the police department there and the news library at the Toledo Blade. I asked them if there’d been any similar unsolved murders of women and their families during the time he lived there in 1997. There wasn’t. So why not? Well, probably because he died before he could kill anybody else.

  None of this, of course, answered the questions about Dani’s death.

  The other killings had stopped in 1997 when Nicholas Faron died. So Dani’s murderer was someone else. Someone who had a different motive for wanting her dead. All the work I’d done here in tracking down the truth about Faron hadn’t gotten me any closer to finding out what happened to Dani.

  But I was convinced whoever killed Dani was somehow linked to all the other murders.

  And to Nicholas Faron.

  All I had to do was figure out who that was.

  • • •

  “Do you remember anything else about that last conversation you had with Dani?” I asked Christine now.

  “Are you kidding? I think about it all the time. I play it over and over in my mind. Like I said, we talked about a lot of things. My art work. Her job. Our personal lives. It was like old times. But mostly she was excited about that case in Ohio. Of course, I didn’t know why at the time.”

  “Did she mention any connection at all between it and your father?”

  “No,” Christine said, shaking her head. “I would have asked her a lot more questions if she had.”

  “And no mention of Faron or Mitchell Aldrich or any other people?”

  “No.”

  “What else do you remember?”

  “Just that she kept talking about what a great story this could be. About the trips she took to Ohio and Michigan. And how she was on the verge of breaking the story wide open with some information she was supposed to get from a source soon. I wonder if that’s what she was doing the night when she died. I’m afraid we may never know the answer.”

  I realized something she had just said didn’t seem right to me.

  “Michigan?” I asked.

  “Yes, she said she’d been to Michigan.”

  “Did she say why?”

  “No. Is that important?”

  CHAPTER 21

  I had put away the box of papers and other materials from Dani’s desk after I found the computer entry that led me onto the serial killer trail. I reached down now, picked up the box from where I’d stashed it under my desk, and started to go through the things I hadn’t seen yet.

  Most of it was what you’d expect to find in a reporter’s desk. Notebooks, pens, clippings, expense account forms for her assignments, credit card receipts—the accumulations of a too-short career for Dani Keegan. I went through the credit card receipts and expense account receipts the most carefully.

  Much of it was from restaurants and coffee shops in New York City where she ate. The last bills were the ones that had the charges for her trip to Ohio. I ran through all of it. Airline tickets. Car reservations. There was a receipt from a restaurant at the Columbus airport. Several more from Logan Point, one of them even from the same diner where I’d eaten when I was there, and some from Littleton, Michigan, too.

  Yep, she’d gone to Littleton—just like I had.

  I thought all along that I’d found out more about this case than Dani ever had time to before she died.

  But I was wrong.

  • • •

  “Remember that ex-cop named Larry Keller, who was a deputy in Logan Point when the Gallagher murders happened,” I told Susan over the phone. “He was one of the first people inside the house. He saw the bodies. He saw Gallagher holding the knife. He arrested him.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “He was also the first guy who figured out what was happening. He kept at it, even when everyone else thought Thomas Gallagher was guilty. He told me he’d been obsessed with this case for his entire life. He told me there might be more murders. He told me about the possible rock lyric connection between the Gallagher killings and the ones in Michigan.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “I might never have found out everything I did if it weren’t for Larry Keller.”

  “Terrific. So let’s give the old guy a medal and just move on, huh?”

  “I went to see him in Littleton, Michigan.”

  “Gil, I still don’t know what you’re talking about . . .”

  “There’s a bill for a restaurant and a motel in Littleton, Michigan, in Dani’s credit card receipts. I just found them when I went through her belongings.”

  “So Dani went to see him because she was looking into the Logan Point case. That makes sense, doesn’t it?”

  “Keller told me he never met Dani.”

  “Maybe she went up there to find him, but never did. You said this guy Keller was kind of hard to track down.”

  “I didn’t know Dani very well,” I told her. “But everyone who did know her said she was a relentless, dogged reporter who never gave up on a lead if she thought there was a story at the end. Dani only stayed in Littleton one night, according to the credit card receipts. If she thought there was a lead there, she would have stayed in Littleton a hundred nights. Because she never gave up on anything. I think she found Larry Keller.”

  “Then why didn’t he tell you that?”

  “That’s what I want to know. Can you do a complete check on Keller? Find out everything from the time he left Logan Point through his career as a private investigator.”

  “And this is all because he didn’t tell you he met Dani?”

  “The question is why he didn’t tell me that he met her.”

  “You don’t think . . . ?”

  “Someone killed Dani.”

  “What would Keller’s motive be to murder her?”

  “What was anybody’s motive? Nicholas Faron is dead. So is almost everybody else in this case. Mitchell Aldrich might have had a motive, I suppose, but I don’t see him for it anymore. There’s no one else I can think of. Larry Keller is the only wild card in the equation. I’ve heard of things like this before. A cop who becomes obsessed with the case and can’t let it go. Eventually the case takes over his life. He becomes a part of it. Maybe he thought Dani was going to solve the case of his lifetime. Maybe that upset him. Maybe he decided it was his case and no one else’s. So he eliminated the only other person who could solve it. He came to New York City and murdered Dani Keegan.”

  “You’re really reaching here, Gil. You need evidence . . .”

  “So get me some evidence.”

  • • •

  Susan called me back at the office the next day.

  She said she’d just sent me an email with the information about Keller. I waited until it landed in my inbox, then clicked open the attachment. I read through what was there—eagerly at first, but then with a growing sense of frustration. Everything I already knew about Keller checked out. His resignation from the Logan Point police force. His career as a private investigator. There were Photostats of his
private investigator’s license and his police credentials from years ago too. Larry Keller was everything that he claimed to be. Nothing about him seemed unusual.

  Until I saw the pictures.

  The first one was taken during Keller’s time on the Logan Point police force. A young, rugged-looking man looked out at me. There was another of Keller from when he first applied for a private investigator’s license in 1991. He looked a bit older in the second picture. But that was all a long time ago. Of course, a person’s appearance changes a lot over a lifetime. Sometimes it’s hard to recognize a man based on a picture of him from so many years ago. And yet there are certain things that even time can’t change. I thought about that as I looked at the pictures of Larry Keller.

  A long time ago, Larry Keller said, he had picked up Lauren Gallagher after she somehow survived the night of terror in that house in Logan Point.

  Then, a few weeks ago, I’d sat with Larry Keller in a diner in Michigan and talked about the case which dominated his life.

  There was only one problem.

  The person in the pictures I was looking at right now was not the man that I met in Michigan who told me he was Larry Keller.

  CHAPTER 22

  I dialed the number for the police department in Cleveland where Faron had died in a hotel fire and told them what I was looking for. Eventually I wound up talking to a Sgt Frank Grabowski, who looked up the information that I wanted from some old files and went through it all for me.

  When he was finished, I asked him the question I’d been thinking about since Susan sent me the old pictures of the real Larry Keller.

  “Are you sure it was Nicholas Faron who died in that hotel room fire in 1997?”

  “Of course, we’re sure.”

  “You had a positive ID?”

  “Absolutely. Personal, plus dental records too.”

  “Personal? You mean someone in Faron’s family looked at the body and confirmed it was him?”

  “Not exactly. The body was too badly burned for that kind of recognition. It was an intense fire that apparently started in some faulty wiring and destroyed the whole room before firemen could get inside to put it out.”

  “So how did you know the victim was Faron?”

  “He had an appointment with somebody—a client, I guess—just before the fire. This guy saw Faron going into his own room after they’d had drinks at the bar downstairs. The guy then went into his own room across the hall. A few minutes later, the fire alarm went off. He pounded on Faron’s locked door, heard him screaming inside but couldn’t get in there to help him. Neither could the firemen until it was too late. So this guy was there pretty much the whole time. No way it couldn’t have been Faron, according to his statement.”

  “And the dental records checked out too?”

  “Yep. We got Faron’s records from his dentist and compared them to the teeth on the body. They were a perfect match.”

  “So that’s why there were never any questions about this story from the client he’d just seen?”

  “What questions? The client had no reason to lie. He was a law enforcement guy himself. An ex-cop.”

  “Let me take a wild guess—his name was Larry Keller, right?”

  Grabowski checked the file. “Uh-huh, that’s right.”

  “Sergeant, where is Nicholas Faron buried?”

  “The file says Faron’s remains were shipped back to Logan Point, Ohio, by his father.”

  “I think you better call up a cop named Rudy Sewell. He’s the chief of police in Logan Point now. Tell him he needs to get an exhumation order to dig up Nicholas Faron’s grave.”

  “You don’t think it’s Faron?”

  “No.”

  “Then who is buried in his grave?”

  “I’m pretty sure you’re going to find out it’s the real Larry Keller.”

  • • •

  It wasn’t hard now to figure out what had happened.

  Larry Keller was an ex-cop who’d become obsessed with the Gallagher case. Suspected they had the wrong man in Tom Gallagher long before anyone else did, but no one listened to him. He drifted from the Logan Point police force, becoming a cop in Cincinnati, then working as a private investigator. But the Gallagher murders continued to haunt him wherever he went. It became his mission in life to find the real killer and see justice done, just like the man I’d sat with in the diner in Littleton, Michigan, had told me.

  Keller finally found his man in 1997. Somehow he figured it out. He tracked him down to the hotel in Cleveland, but something went wrong. Nicholas Faron killed Keller, then set the fire to make it look like Faron himself had died—probably in case Keller had told anyone else about what he’d discovered. Then he simply assumed Larry Keller’s identity as a private investigator.

  That was the man I’d met in Michigan. Not Larry Keller. Nicholas Faron. Which is why the picture of Nicholas Faron from the Ohio Southern yearbook looked vaguely familiar to me.

  The one thing I didn’t understand was the dental records. Why did they match up with Nicholas Faron if it wasn’t really him? The only answer was a simple one. Somebody had switched Keller’s and Faron’s dental records. But in order to accomplish that, the switch must have happened before the fire.

  Grabowski told me that the cops had gotten Faron’s dental records from a dentist in Toledo named Dr. Joseph DiLeo. I called information for the Toledo area and got the number for a DDS named Joseph DiLeo Jr. It turned out he was the wrong one. It was his father I was looking for, and he was dead. Junior had taken over the practice after his father’s death, DiLeo told me.

  “Look, Dr. DiLeo, I know this is a long shot, but I’m looking for information about whether or not you ever heard of any kind of a break-in happening at your father’s office.”

  “Yes, I do remember one. My dad was very upset about it. Nothing like that had ever happened to him before.”

  “Would this have been sometime around 1997?”

  “I don’t remember the exact year. But I was a teenager . . . yes, that sounds about right.”

  “What was stolen from the office?”

  “That’s the strange part. My father never found anything that was missing. Somebody jimmied the lock, got inside, and set off the security system. But then they left before even taking anything.”

  Maybe the intruder wasn’t interested in taking anything, I thought, maybe he was there to leave something instead.

  I was pretty sure that if I tracked down whatever dentist Larry Keller had used in another city I’d find out there’d been a break-in there, too, sometime before that. Faron had stolen Keller’s dental records first, then switched them with his own when he broke into Dr. DiLeo’s office. So when the cops called asking for Faron’s dental records, they were really getting Keller’s. That’s why they never questioned the ID of the burned body.

  The other thing about all this, of course, is that it would have taken time to pull off. Faron had to go to a different city, get Keller’s dental records, and then place them in his own dentist’s office. This wasn’t a spontaneous murder. He knew Keller was coming after him. He knew that sooner or later the ex-cop would catch up with him. So he was ready. He planned the whole thing out in advance.

  The bottom line was that Nicholas Faron was still alive.

  He was still out there somewhere.

  He was still killing.

  He had murdered Dani.

  CHAPTER 23

  The police in Littleton tracked Faron down from the post office box to an apartment house on the outskirts of town. They cordoned off the block, evacuating neighbors from their homes. Then a SWAT team wearing bulletproof vests and heavily armed with automatic weapons smashed down the door and burst into Faron’s house. He was gone.

  Tenants in the apartment house said the man they knew as Larry Keller had lived there for a long time
, and they all remembered him as a decent, friendly, quiet neighbor who never did anything that seemed suspicious to them. He apparently functioned as a private investigator, working out of an office in his home. There were files and cases of documents found inside the apartment. Nicholas Faron had obviously taken over Keller’s identity and his life too. He had killed over and over again for a dozen years until the encounter with Keller. Then there was nothing until the apparent murder of Dani Keegan. The question that remained unanswered was why?

  The New York cops kept me at police headquarters for an entire day, working with a police artist on a sketch of the man I’d met who called himself Larry Keller, but who was really Nicholas Faron. By the time I finished, we had a pretty good likeness of him. The gray hair, the beard, the eyes—it was Faron, all right. The sketch was sent out to police departments across the country along with a warning that the suspect was very dangerous and to proceed with extreme caution in attempting to apprehend him.

  They dug up the body that was supposed to be Faron and carried out a series of DNA tests on the remains of the tissue in the grave. It would take several weeks for the results to be known. But everyone was pretty sure that it was going to turn out to be Larry Keller, not Nicholas Faron who had died in that fire.

  I called Jonathan Faron to see how he was dealing with the news. I got Carrie Nash instead. She said he was still in a state of shock over everything that had happened. She said he’d made peace with the sins of his son a long time ago, but always assumed that the evil was over. Now he knew his son, the person who had killed his wife and spilled so much other blood, was still alive after all these years. It was almost too much for the old man to handle.

  • • •

  The unanswered question in this case had always been why the baby, Lauren Gallagher, survived that night.

  Now I was pretty sure I knew the answer.

  I remembered Faron telling me that day in Michigan—when I still thought he was Larry Keller—about holding the Gallagher baby in his arms when he found her alive after the murders. He was very emotional when he told that story. He said it was God’s will she had survived.