Finally, I began thinking of the soft purring I heard in the distance and looked overhead to see if a medical chopper was fluttering down the river toward Massachusetts General Hospital. I saw no lights.
The sound grew louder, grinding closer. I slowed down my rowing and looked to my left, and then to my right, and saw a tiny flashlight hovering over the water about a hundred yards away toward the middle of the river — apparently a boat. I assumed it was a state police trooper on late-night patrol — someone who was undoubtedly wondering what kind of moron was rowing in a scull at this hour.
Sure enough, the sound of the engine got louder still, the light brighter. I pulled the oars up and rested for a moment, the wind still banging at my neck, the sky unusually bright above. The light continued toward me, close enough that I could hear voices — men, I believe, shouting above the din of the outboard.
About twenty yards away, I could see what looked to be the outlines of a small powerboat, perhaps a Boston whaler. I could make out the silhouettes of two people standing inside it. One of them appeared to be peering through binoculars or some sort of nightscope at me. I thought I heard one of them say to the other, “No life jacket,” though I could have been wrong, what with the wind and the engine and my own labored breathing. If he did say it, he was wrong; the vest happened to be concealed by the blocky down parka. I failed to see, it’s worth noting, any sort of blue police light on the visiting boat.
At about fifteen yards away, I called out, “Can I help you?” Granted, it was a dumb question; I was in a scull, they were in a powerboat. But I thought it might be advantageous, at least to me, to get a dialogue started.
In response, I got no response, except that the driver of the boat gunned the engine and veered sharply to his left — toward the rear of my shell. He zipped off toward the shore, the boat melting into the darkness.
My shell, meanwhile, rocked violently from his wake, almost to the point of capsizing. I struggled to maintain equilibrium, like a cowboy on a bucking bronco, until the waves settled down and I finally achieved it.
And then came the grinding sound all over again, this time in my face, meaning from the rear of the scull. It got louder more quickly than before, though with no light. Soon I saw the powerboat, first as a hazy form, then in greater definition. It came roaring at me, its speed increasing, and cut just to my right, coming within five yards of the side of my boat. It appeared to be the Union Club’s small powerboat that was kept in the storage garage.
Again I surged sideways. I could feel my entire right side up in the air, as if I was on one of those amusement park rides that used to invariably make me puke as a kid. I tucked my head down, preparing to flip over, but miraculously came just short of the tipping point, a phrase I understood more intimately at that moment than I ever intended. I splashed back down on the river, the water hitting my face, my arms, and my hair. I rocked back and forth for another couple of minutes before the waves died down again.
Okay, so these weren’t cops. But who?
I could still hear the whir of their outboard motor, but could no longer see the craft. As I held my balance, I started thinking where else a heartbroken reporter amid a potentially huge story would have gone to wash away his sorrow and anxieties. The Bristol Lounge at the Four Seasons wouldn’t have been a bad choice; the worst thing that could have happened is that someone might have tipped my wineglass over rather than my scull. But no, here I was in the middle of the Charles River legitimately wondering if I’d ever get back to terra firma alive.
I pointed the boat toward the shoreline and started rowing madly. Louder came the engine. The spotlight suddenly illuminated again, shining directly in my eyes. I heard someone on the boat say, “The bastard’s still up.” Probably not for long, I wanted to tell them, but didn’t have the time. They accelerated toward me from the front of the boat, meaning from my back, veered off again at the last minute, and sped away. And in one giant swell, I flipped helplessly into the water, as if it was my destiny.
I probably don’t have to report how cold the Charles River felt in the middle of an unseasonably cool Boston March, but I will. I will. It was fucking freezing. It was the type of cold that made you believe your fun parts would never again be any fun — in fact, they’d probably have to be amputated in the off chance you got out of this alive. It was mind-numbing, head-pounding, body-enveloping cold.
Immediately, I bobbed back to the surface and resisted the urge to scream for help. The only people who would have heard me were the same people trying to drown me. I treaded water and let my eyes adjust. The scull was but a few feet from me; the shoreline to my right about fifty yards away.
That’s when I heard the motor again and saw the light sweeping across the black skin about ten yards to my left. If they saw me, they would try again to kill me. As much as I couldn’t believe I was doing this, I dove under the freezing water in the direction of my boat, surfaced just in front of it, jockeyed underneath it, and pushed my face up into the air pocket where I had previously sat.
I could feel my body going completely numb, to the point that I wondered if I would eventually be able to swim for shore. I could sense my head going woozy, as if I might pass out, in which case I knew I wouldn’t be getting to shore. I thought of the time I dove into the frigid waters of Boston Harbor after an intruder, as well as the afternoon I had to paddle through a Florida swamp to get away from an attacker who preferred me dead. I spent more time in the damned drink than a trainer at SeaWorld. I made a mental note to bill the Record for some swimming lessons if I ever got out of this mess alive.
Finally, I could hear the outboard engine sputtering slowly just a few feet away, causing little ripples as it circled the scull.
I heard one of my would-be killers say, “He’s in the drink, and he’s not surviving more than five minutes in those temperatures.”
No kidding.
I heard the second man say, “Let’s get out of here.” The engine roared, and then quickly faded from earshot. I ducked back underwater, surfaced again in the open river, and thrashed slowly toward the shore.
What seemed like five days later, I made it. I staggered across some large rocks, up onto the grassy expanse, and collapsed onto my knees. I didn’t know much about hypothermia, but I did know this: Do not fall asleep. I’d be a goner. So I forced myself up and plodded onward, across a field, along a paved, lighted path, and toward a footbridge over Storrow Drive. The one advantage of being this cold was that I had reached a point of not being able to feel a thing. It was as if I was watching myself amble onward rather than actually doing it.
Finally, I made it over to the other side of the bridge into Back Bay. I lurched down an alley, got to Beacon Street, and began frantically waving at traffic. Within two seconds, a car, a cab no less, screeched to a halt. I fumbled with the door handle. Truth is, my hands were so cold that I had lost any refined motor skills. It took both hands to finally pry it open, and I slumped into the seat with a mix of abject fear and absolute relief.
“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?
6
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.
7
&nbs
p; 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?”
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