The Midnight Hour

by R. G. Belsky

  She was his daughter, and he couldn’t kill her.

  But then he lost her. She disappeared, and he never knew what happened to her.

  I had a theory about what had happened next:

  Suppose he’d heard the baby daughter he knew as Lauren Gallagher had been spirited off to New York after the murders. Maybe he remembered the FBI agent who’d been there in Logan Point during the investigation. When Dani first tracked him down, he probably assumed Dani was his missing daughter. He didn’t know there was another sister.

  Then, when he found out the truth, he might have decided he needed to eradicate Dani from the equation for some bizarre reason—the same way he eradicated all those other innocent family members. He arranged a meeting with her in New York. She, of course, had no reason to fear him. She thought he was still the private investigator who’d been following the case all these years.

  There was something else too. When I met Faron in Littleton, he was the one who told me about the “Midnight Hour” connection to the other murder. Had he done the same thing with Dani? And what about all the other information Dani found out about the murders? Maybe Faron gave it to her too.

  I think for some reason Nicholas Faron wanted to reveal everything about his secret past to his long-lost daughter.

  He just got the wrong daughter.

  • • •

  The cops had still found no sign of Faron anywhere when I talked to Marilyn Staley about all this.

  “Let’s do a front-page appeal in the News for Faron to turn himself in,” Staley said when I was finished.

  It was an old tabloid newspaper ploy. The front-page appeal to a dangerous fugitive. Hell, during the Son of Sam murders back in the seventies, the New York papers were practically doing it every week. There was really no downside. If the suspect did by chance turn himself in at some point, then the paper got to claim credit for it. If not, well . . . you sold some papers and you got a big front-page story out of it. For an editor like Staley, it was definitely a win-win situation.

  “You’ve got a personal connection with the guy. You met him. You figured out he was the killer. You figured out he was still alive. Write it with that personal angle. Make it really compelling. I can help, if you want . . .”

  “I know how to do compelling, Marilyn.”

  My piece ran on the front page of the News the next day. The headline said simply:

  PLEASE GIVE

  YOURSELF UP!

  In the article, I wrote: “If you give yourself up, I will help you. I will make sure you get lawyers who will give you the best defense possible for your actions no matter how loud the public outcry for vengeance. I will make sure that you get every advantage the American legal system has to offer even though you gave no such mercy to any of your victims. It is time for you to do the right thing. I believe—somewhere deep down—that is what you want to do, too. I think that’s why you’ve surfaced now after all this time.”

  The story got played big on all the cable news channels and made every evening network newscast in the country. One way or another, Faron should hear about it. Wherever he was.

  Of course, I didn’t really expect Faron to do what I was asking. I mean I figured the last thing in the world he’d do was simply call me up, say he’d read the article and wanted to stop running after thirty years. But that’s exactly what did happen. He just called me at the News.

  “This is Larry Keller,” he said on the phone.

  “Don’t you mean Nicholas Faron?”

  “Faron is dead.”

  He said it with such conviction that I wondered if at some point he really had convinced himself he was now Keller, not Faron.

  “Everything you said in that article was right, Malloy. It is time to end this.”

  “So you’ll go to the police.”

  “No, not to the police. To you. Meet me tonight, just before midnight, in the lobby of the building on the Lower East Side. The Aldrich construction site.”

  “The place where Dani died? C’mon, why would I be stupid enough to meet with you at the same location where you’ve already killed another reporter?”

  “Because my daughter will be there too.”

  I suddenly realized what he was saying.

  “You mean, Christine . . .”

  “I finally have Lauren back again.”

  CHAPTER 24

  She was there, all right. Faron had handcuffed Christine to a construction platform in the building’s lobby and put duct tape over her mouth. She looked scared. But I thought she looked tough, too. I guess you wound up being tough when you grew up in Jack Keegan’s family.

  Faron was pointing a gun at me.

  “Don’t worry, I won’t hurt her,” he said when I stepped inside the lobby. “I didn’t hurt her thirty years ago in Logan Point. And I’m not going to hurt her now.”

  I exchanged a glance with Christine, trying to assure her everything was going to be all right. Even though I wasn’t so sure about that myself.

  “What about me?” I asked Faron.

  “I’m not going to hurt you either.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I need you.”

  “For what?”

  “To tell my story.”

  • • •

  The police were outside. Massed on the street and waiting. Faron never asked about that, but he clearly knew the situation. He’d never even said anything about “no police.” Not that it would have made any difference. They were, of course, the first call I made after getting off the phone with him.

  There had been intense discussions about how to proceed. There was a lot of sentiment to just send an army of police, federal agents, and SWAT teams in to demand his surrender or else. But the problem was he had a hostage. Christine Keegan. If they went in with force and opened fire, she could be a casualty.

  That’s when I volunteered to go in first by myself. Just like Faron had wanted. I didn’t make this offer lightly. I had no desire to get killed by a crazy man. But it was a big story. It was my story. And I would be right in the center of it when everything reached a conclusion.

  They’d fitted me with a bulletproof vest under my shirt. That gave me a little solace, but it wasn’t going to help if he shot me in the head.

  “Tell me about Logan Point,” I said to Faron. “Why did you kill Kathleen Gallagher and her two daughters?”

  “She disappointed me,” he said. “Just like my own mother did. They all disappointed me. Every woman in my life.”

  “Because she wanted to break it off with you?”

  “She said she was going to try and make it work with her husband again. That English professor. I was so angry. I wanted to destroy them all.”

  He looked over at Christine, and I wondered if he was reliving in his head the events of that night in 1985. And how many times he had done that over the years.

  “I went to talk to Kathleen. I wanted to convince her to change her mind about us. I knew her husband wouldn’t be there because he was scheduled to be with me for a tutoring session. I figured it was the perfect way to make sure he didn’t interrupt. By the time he gave up on me and went home again, I would have had plenty of time to make Kathleen see why he was all wrong for her. But she told me she didn’t want to see me again. So I went to the kitchen and got a large butcher knife. Then I killed her. I decided that if I couldn’t have her, no one could. I wanted to hurt her. I wanted to hurt her worse than anyone had ever been hurt before. So I killed her and everyone in that house. Except my own daughter.”

  “Why the two little girls?” I asked. “Their mother was dead. Why did you have to murder them too?”

  “You don’t understand,” he said. “You’ve got the chronology wrong. Kathleen wasn’t dead yet.”

  The horror of what he was saying suddenly hit me.

  “You
killed the two little girls upstairs first?”

  “Yes. Just killing Kathleen wasn’t enough. I decided to take away something that was even dearer to her than her own life. So I brought her upstairs and made her watch as I slit the first little girl’s throat while she slept. She screamed so loudly that it woke up the other one, the six-year-old. Kathleen cried out for her to run. The girl tried to get away, but I caught up with her before she even made it to the steps. Then I cut her throat too. Kathleen was crying hysterically now. I dragged her down the hall to Lauren, sleeping in the crib. That’s when Kathleen finally told me the truth.”

  “What truth?”

  “About me being Lauren’s father.”

  “You didn’t know until then?”

  “No. I’d started dating Kathleen about a year and a half earlier when I was a sophomore in school. After she got pregnant, we didn’t see each other for a while. But then it started up again after Lauren was born. We’d meet at my place or a hotel or sometimes even at her house when her husband was teaching a class. On that last night she asked me if I remembered the time when we’d done it in her bed while her husband was at a faculty union meeting. We didn’t use a condom that night. It was very spontaneous and I hadn’t brought any protection with me. Kathleen said it was the only time she’d done it that way with anyone. She always used a condom with her other lovers. And she told me that her husband had had a vasectomy after the second girl was born. So I had to be the father. But she kept it a secret from me until that moment.”

  He looked over at Christine. I think he was talking more to her than to me at this point.

  “I looked down at you in the crib, Lauren, and I knew I couldn’t kill you like the others. You were my daughter. I leaned down and I kissed you. I promised myself that I would figure out some way to make you mine after it was all over. I didn’t think you’d disappear the way you did.”

  Faron looked back at me now.

  “After Kathleen told me the truth about Lauren, I took her back downstairs. She wasn’t screaming anymore. I had to admire her courage. She knew what was going to happen. But it was as if she’d accepted her fate and made peace with the fact that she was going to die.”

  “What about the rest of the murders?” I asked. “All those other women and their families across the country in the years that followed? Why did you kill them?”

  “They disappointed me too. Just like Kathleen disappointed me. And my mother disappointed me.”

  “And Dani Keegan?”

  “I didn’t know there were two daughters. I’d tried very hard to track Lauren down when she was a baby in the weeks after the murders, but she was gone. I was never able to figure it out until I was watching TV and saw this feature about a New York City reporter named Keegan who was the daughter of the district attorney. The name Keegan rang a bell with me. I remembered that was the name of the FBI agent from New York who had talked to me during the Gallagher investigation. So I did some checking on him. I discovered he was the same one that had come to Logan Point. I also found out he’d adopted a daughter in 1985. So I put two and two together and assumed the woman I’d seen on television was Lauren. I really thought she was my daughter.”

  Faron looked outside through the door now. He saw the lights of the cops massed out there. I wondered where this was going.

  “Not long ago, I got some bad news from a doctor. The details don’t really matter. What’s important is I don’t have a lot of time left. The funny thing is I really enjoyed being Larry Keller. I never liked being Nicholas Faron. I hated my father; I hated the money; I hated myself. The only person I ever loved was my mother and she betrayed me in the end, too. So that cop Larry Keller really did me a favor when he tracked me down back in 1997. I guess that’s why I never killed anyone after that until now. I never felt the need to anymore. I was happy. But I knew there was one more thing I needed to finish from Nicholas Faron’s life before I died. I needed to find the daughter I had lost.”

  “It was you who first got Dani interested in the case, wasn’t it?”

  “That’s right. I sent her an anonymous tip about her father’s involvement in the old case. How he and everyone else had bungled the Logan Point murders. Eventually, she tracked me down in Littleton. Just like you did. But she believed that I was Larry Keller too. She’d figured out a lot of it, but not everything. So I gave her all the information she needed to put the mass murders together. All five cases, the links between them, the song lyric stuff, the crime scenes—I made sure she knew it all. She thought she was getting it from Larry Keller, of course. It was all still circumstantial; there were no hard facts. Then I told her I’d just uncovered the evidence she needed. I said I was coming to New York, and I wanted to meet her there to tell her all about it.”

  That explained why Dani had gone so willingly to meet her killer in that abandoned building. She thought she was going to see Larry Keller. A dedicated ex-cop and private investigator who had helped her unravel the long-buried secrets of this case. She had no reason to be afraid. Until it was too late.

  “My plan was to reveal to her at that meeting that I was her real father. But, when I got to New York, I did some checking and found out that there were two Keegan daughters. When I checked on the ages, I realized I’d been talking to the wrong one. So I went ahead with the meeting—I even picked a Mitchell Aldrich building as the location, a nice touch, don’t you think? I told her everything. Then I killed her.”

  “Why?”

  “She was the wrong one. She had to die. Just like the others.”

  “And you killed them all at midnight . . .”

  “Yes, I made sure of that.”

  “Why midnight?”

  “Because,” Faron said patiently, as if he was explaining it to a small child, “it was midnight when I killed my mother.”

  He looked over at Christine again, who had a look of growing horror on her face from the casual way he had described the way he had murdered her sister in cold blood for no real reason.

  “Okay, you’ve told me your story,” I said to Faron. “That’s what you wanted. What do we do now?”

  He looked down at his watch.

  “It’s almost midnight,” Faron said.

  “What happens at midnight?”

  “The end of the story.”

  He walked over to Christine now, unlocked one end of the handcuffs from the construction platform, and then reattached the link to his own arm. He pushed her in front of him and began walking toward the door, with her between him and the police outside waiting to shoot him.

  I watched from the lobby as he made his way outside for about a half dozen steps like that, then stopped.

  For a few seconds, nothing happened.

  At first, I wondered what he was doing.

  But then I understood.

  He was checking his watch.

  Finally, at what police would say later was exactly midnight, he hugged Christine and gave her a big kiss on the cheek.

  Then he unlocked the handcuffs on her, pushed her away, and turned to face the cops with the gun in hand.

  I heard gunshots.

  First from him.

  Then the police.

  Nicholas Faron fell to the ground and died instantly.

  CHAPTER 25

  They call it suicide by cop,” Christine said to me. “My father explained it afterward. He said sometimes a violent suspect like Faron knows there’s no way out for them. He wants to die, but he doesn’t have the courage or the strength to commit suicide. So he puts himself in a situation where he knows the police will have to kill him. It’s not an actual suicide, but the result is the same. I guess that’s the way he wanted to end it all.”

  We were sitting in her Greenwich Village art gallery again. It had been a while since that night on the Lower East Side when Faron died—and I decided to drop by and see how she wa
s doing. I suppose in the back of my mind I was hoping there was a story there. But really I was just curious to see how things had worked out for her.

  A lot had happened since Faron died.

  Jack Keegan had officially stepped down as Manhattan district attorney after more than thirty legendary years on the job. There were various investigations into his dealings with Aldrich and the background of what happened between the two men. It was still a possibility that criminal charges could be filed against him. But, given the circumstances of why he bent the rules for Aldrich, there was not a lot of appetite for this. It was clear though that his days as a prosecutor or a major figure of any kind in law enforcement were over.

  I had a big run in the public spotlight, too, with my exclusive account of what happened that night and several subsequent stories about the case. I was definitely riding high again for a while. But it’s a funny thing about the reporting business: you’re only as good as your last story. I always remember one reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize and the paper threw this huge party for him to celebrate. At some point during the party, the reporter’s editor pulled him aside and asked: “So what have you got for me tomorrow?” It was always true in print, and it’s even truer now in the days of the Internet. No matter how big the story, you always need to do it again for the next news cycle.

  Meanwhile, Susan and I still had a relationship, just not the relationship I wanted. I know she loves me—on some level anyway—but not enough to marry me again. I think at this point she just wants to start over fresh with someone new instead of replaying the ups and downs of our past one more time. Maybe she’s right. I’ve tried to give her some space and some time. I don’t want to lose her completely from my life. I’ve gone out with a few other women, although none of them have developed into anything serious yet. It’s tough to find a woman to get serious about when you’re constantly comparing her to someone like Susan.

  And you know what? I’m okay with all that. Pretty much anyway.