None of the messages, perceptive minds might note, were from anyone identifying themselves as the Phantom Fiend. For that matter, I was also lacking a voice mail from one Maggie Kane, who almost became Maggie Kane Flynn, though not really.
I was about thirty minutes from the Strip, not including traffic, so it wasn’t worth my while to go back to the hotel. Instead, I pulled off the road into the parking lot of a lush golf club named Dunes East, even though there wasn’t a dune within a hundred miles of the place, and called Martin back. He, of course, picked up the phone on the first ring and promptly explained that the city of Boston was unraveling at the seams.
Police, he said, held a press conference at Schroeder Plaza to say they were unconvinced that a serial killer was on the loose, and publicly complained that the Record had published its story before any of the correspondence could be — their word here — “authenticated.” I’m not really sure how you authenticate a note from an anonymous person, and I don’t think they knew either. But you can bet that the blow-dried reporters on the six o’clock newscasts wouldn’t be probing this particular point as they repeated the complaints verbatim. Also, you can bet that Jill Dawson and Lauren Hutchens wouldn’t have had any doubt about the existence of a serial killer, if they were still around to have doubt, which is once again the point.
Those aforementioned television reporters were chronicling a massive run on pepper spray and mace by women, as well as a surge in demand for area locksmiths, according to Martin. One particularly creative reporter even did a stand-up from the Animal Rescue League’s dog shelter, where she reported a sudden spike in dog adoptions by the city’s female population.
There weren’t any other new developments on the story, Martin said — no more calls to the Barry Bor Show that morning, no blog postings, no new deaths — at least none we knew about yet. Maybe the Phantom was all mine again. We can only hope, right?
Martin told me that Edgar Sullivan wanted to speak to me, but was in a meeting for the next twenty minutes and would call back. I briefed Martin about my Walters meeting and promised to be on an eastbound plane by nightfall.
I then called back a few of the print reporters who had left me messages earlier in the day. To each of them I explained off the record about the various notes but said I was forbidden from talking for attribution, which in a way was true; I had forbidden myself. The TV people I didn’t bother with, knowing full well they wouldn’t have bothered with me.
And I hung up. I checked the dashboard clock and it read 10:50 a.m. I figured it would be safe to return to the Walters’s house at about noon — safe meaning that the Abu Ghraib guard who doubled as his home health care worker would be gone by then. At least I hoped she would be.
I listened to more voice mails on my work machine, but again, nothing from the Phantom Fiend or my phantom fiancée, though I wonder if that title expires with an unrealized wedding day, or whether, like retired ambassadors, we carry the moniker for life. I kind of doubt that, but the thought made me realize I was getting punchy.
Sitting in the front seat of my rental car, I had nothing to do but wait, and as I did just that, temptation finally overwhelmed me, sending me in the direction of the immaculate driving range where half a dozen or so guys were hitting golf balls. I grabbed a five-iron out of a bag of extremely expensive demo clubs, approached a pile of golf balls stacked into a pyramid, and began to hit.
My first shot of the new golf season faded hard to the right, but it didn’t feel bad. The second was a little fat, the third a bit thin. The fourth shot clicked effortlessly off the clubface, long and straight, as did the next, and the one after that.
The morning sun was high in the sky, warm without being overwhelming. The air was clean and crisp, the sky an ocean blue, dare I say the color of my eyes. I was starting to feel pretty damned good.
I traded in the five-iron for a pitching wedge and lobbed balls at a flag about a hundred yards away, one after another falling just to the right or the left — not bad for a New Englander swinging for the first time at the end of a brutal winter. I thought of so many of my more memorable rounds — my father teaching me the game on the tenth fairway of the Number Two course at Ponkapoag outside of Boston; the day at Congressional Country Club in Maryland with the president of the United States when shots rang out and we both ended up bloodied in the sandtrap on the sixteenth hole; the late Sunday afternoon shoot-out on the hallowed links of Pebble Beach with my best friend, Harry Putnam, as we celebrated his impending nuptials.
My father was dead. The president was retired. Harry was married now to a woman that neither one of us particularly liked, but he said he was sticking it through for the sake of his young son and daughter. The world, I thought, is an ever-changing place, but too rarely for the better. It also seems to be a diminishing place; the people you love most tend to leave you too soon.
So much for my rising mood.
A young man came sauntering toward me in a pair of golf cleats and a shirt with an insignia that said “Dunes East.”
“Sir, are you playing with us today?” he asked, politely more than accusatorily. I apologetically explained that I was out from Boston on business, was returning a few phone calls from the road, and was just hitting a few shots before I got back to work.
“Ah, Boston,” he said. Usually this line preceded what used to be a crack about the Red Sox, but was now more along the lines of congratulations. Instead, though, he continued, “That’s crazy with that new serial killer you’ve got, huh? Have you read about it?”
Try written about it, but I wasn’t going to tell him that. Before I could reply, one of the guys hitting balls a dozen or so yards away looked up and said, “I saw that on CNN this morning. That’s really scary, no? This new killer is like the old killer from back in the seventies.”
It was actually the sixties, but again, I wasn’t of any mind to correct him. Instead, I asked the young assistant pro, “What’s the latest?”
“You know, cops saying they’re not sure whether the whole thing is a prank. Two women dead. The newspaper there getting anonymous letters when someone is killed. Pretty damned spooky, if you ask me.”
I hadn’t, but still found his take interesting. There are some stories, very rare stories, that transcend gender and geography, class and race, and serve to bring people together in conversation and speculation, sometimes in hope, other times, like now, in fear. This was one of those stories, and I was in the absolute middle of it.
As we talked, my phone vibrated in my back pocket, and I could see on the caller ID that it was coming from the Record. I quickly excused myself and walked back to the car. It was Martin. He said he had Edgar Sullivan and Monica Gonsalves, the paper’s technology guru, on a conference call. They both said hello. I barely knew how to use call waiting, and made a mental note to get a session in telephone operations when I got back east.
Edgar said, “Jack, we’ve been monitoring your incoming mail for obvious reasons. I hope you don’t mind. First off, I want to be on record as saying I think it’s fine that you’re the New England chapter vice president of the Martha Stewart Fan Club.”
That Edgar, such a card. This, for whatever reason, made Monica laugh uproariously. It’s probably reasonable to note here that since Monica works in IT, almost anything could make her laugh uproariously.
Edgar continued, “You received a disc in this morning’s mail, an unlabeled DVD in an unmarked envelope with a Boston postmark. I opened it. There was no note included. I didn’t feel right invading your privacy by viewing the DVD, but I did take the liberty of having Monica upload the contents into the computer system. She, in turn, is going to e-mail it to you, and you can view it and determine whether it’s got anything to do with this Phantom Fiend business. It probably doesn’t, but I don’t want to leave anything to chance right now.”
Edgar is how old? Sixty-five? Seventy? Older? And here I am, somewhere in the middle of my life, and I lost him at DVD. I said, “That’s great, b
ut I’m not near my hotel at the moment to view it.”
Monica chimed in. “Jack, Monica here.” She said this even though she was the only woman on the call, as if I was an absolute idiot. I guess maybe when you work in IT, you grow accustomed to the idea that everyone around you is an idiot. “Do you have your laptop with you?”
“I do.”
“You can receive your e-mail right from your laptop.”
I went into a long explanation of how I couldn’t, because I wasn’t wired into anything. She went into a longer explanation on how I didn’t have to be because of something called an air card that she had installed in my machine a year ago when she had it in for maintenance. I explained that she was wrong. She asked me to press a couple of buttons and proved that she was right. All in all, this is why I don’t make my living writing manuals for IBM, though that would probably pay more and prove less hazardous, at least compared to my professional life at the moment.
We hung up so I could deal with the DVD. I called up the e-mail with the video clip, expecting it to be another piece of schlock from an independent film producer desperately looking for a few moments of free publicity that would allow his arty movie to take off in the direction of The Blair Witch Project.
As the video was downloading, my phone rang again.
“Hey, Fair Hair, I hope you’re about to tell me you won a million dollars at the craps table, spent the night having wild sex with a pair of thousand-dollar-an-hour escorts, and are about to quit journalism to pursue your dream of being a hydroponics farmer.”
It was my mother.
Just kidding. It was Mongillo.
I said, “You’re using spy satellite photography to monitor my every move, aren’t you?”
With the halfhearted attempts at humor out of the way, he asked me how I was doing. I, in turn, told him about my meeting with Bob Walters and his information about Paul Vasco.
I said, “I don’t even know if he’s still alive, but my gut says he’s the key.”
Mongillo replied, “Best that I know, Vasco is alive and well.”
As he was talking, the video began playing on my laptop screen, a very methodical tour of the inside of a reasonably nice apartment. The camera proceeded slowly around the living room, pausing at an ornate marble fireplace, scanning the coffee table, which held some magazines and an unlit candle, glancing past a chunky contemporary couch in what a designer might describe as an aloof shade of gray. The tape looked to be nothing more than a particularly aggressive Realtor trying to sell an upscale condominium.
I said to Mongillo, “Oh yeah? Walters was adamant about it. We need to track Vasco down and double-team him. I’m going to be back east sometime later tonight, not in time to do us any good for tomorrow’s paper. It would be great if we could see him by tomorrow.”
As I said this, the camera proceeded from the living room to the small kitchen, the angle drifting over the appliances to a stainless-steel kitchen door that had a photograph of a tanned thirtysomething man in a blue blazer and open collared white shirt with his arm around a smiling woman in a yellow sundress.
Mongillo said, “Your wish is my command. Can you invite a murderer to lunch, or is that unseemly?”
Whoever was carrying the camera was now walking it down a narrow hallway that seemed to connect the front of the apartment to the back, the picture growing darker without any ambient light. I could make out a collection of old maps on the hallway walls, and at the end of the hall was a giant vintage poster, an advertisement for a trans-Atlantic voyage on board the Queen Elizabeth II. Very stylish. Maybe I’d buy the place. I wonder if I could get it furnished.
I said to Martin, “Why don’t you just find out where he is, for starters. We’ll figure out tomorrow’s lunch plan later.”
He hung up. The camera took a left into a rear bedroom of what Realtors call a floor-thru apartment. For whatever reason, I became instantly drawn in by the image, my spine feeling a slight chill. I wasn’t entirely sure why until I took a harder, more focused look. Unlike the front room and kitchen, the bedroom was in a state of disarray, as if it had been ransacked. Items had been knocked off a bureau and could be seen scattered on the carpeted floor — loose change, a makeup kit, a jewelry chest. A closet door was ajar. Clothes were flung here and there. A desk chair had been flipped on its side. If this was a real estate promotion, I’d want a new Realtor.
That’s when the camera casually but abruptly focused on the rumpled bed, and clear as day, which is when this shot was taken, I could see the woman who had been shown in the photograph on the refrigerator door.
She was sprawled on top of a white comforter, dead, her eyes wide open, her tight purple tank top lifted above her bare breasts. She was completely disrobed from the waist down. She had her head propped up on a pair of pillows. Her bare legs were parted wide, one of them bent awkwardly under her at the knee. She had what looked to be a pair of nylons wrapped around her neck in a ligature, tightened into a knot, and then tied into a looping bow just beneath her chin. I could see blood in her right ear, and drops and smears of blood on the sheets. Her face looked unsettlingly serene, as if death came as a relief from what she had gone through in the moments before it.
The camera casually lingered on her body the same way it did on the coffee table and the refrigerator door, as if this body was nothing more than another inanimate object in what was now a completely lifeless apartment. And then the image simply went blank, a circle appearing in the screen where the video had just played. My eyes remained frozen on it, as if at any moment anything else could appear. After a few long seconds, I clicked the video player off, placed the laptop on the passenger seat beside me, and took a couple of long, deep breaths. When I shut my eyes, I could see the woman’s face, her brown hair matted against her right temple, her sharp blue eyes, her slightly chubby cheeks. Someone’s girlfriend, someone’s daughter, someone’s friend, maybe someone’s aunt. And my bet is, I was the only living person besides her killer who knew she was dead.
I pounded out Martin’s number. He, in turn, put Edgar on another conference line, as well as Vinny Mongillo and Monica Gonsalves. She e-mailed the three of them the link, and all three watched it in silence as we stayed on the line. Well, almost silence. At the key moment, I heard Martin mutter, “What the frick.” Mongillo gasped. Poor Edgar simply said, “Dear Jesus.”
Martin cleared his throat and asked, “Okay, now what?”
I replied, “The Phantom has struck again. Problem is, we don’t know where. He didn’t give us any indication here.”
“Much as I hate to let this story get away from us, we need to get a copy of this to the cops, right?” Martin asked.
Before I could say anything, Mongillo said, “This will at least prove that we were right in reporting the likelihood of a serial killer in today’s story.”
Mongillo was right. So was Martin. I offered to get the police a copy of the e-mail, because I had to return Detective Mac Foley’s call anyway.
Martin was adopting that calm tone he gets as a story grows more chaotic. He said, “My impression is that this is a reportable event, this video. We opened the door today. We can’t shut it on more news now.”
Mongillo said, “Unless we start getting every two-bit prankster in the world. How do we prevent that, and how do we know beef from baloney?”
Martin asked, “Why the frick didn’t the person who sent this disc give us a fricking address?”
Before I could say anything, Edgar cleared his throat and announced, “He did.”
There was a moment of silence as Edgar — intentionally, I suspect — let the drama build. He finally continued, saying, “The cameraman scanned some magazines on the coffee table. He more than scanned them, he lingered on them. While you gentlemen were discussing the story, I pulled that part of the clip out, froze it, and magnified it on my screen. If you look closely at the magazines, they all contain the same name and address on the front: Kimberly May at 284 Commonwealth Avenue in Bost
on.” He paused, then said, “It’s in the Back Bay.”
Where was Edgar Sullivan before he came to the Record, at Scotland Yard? Make him a reporter and we’d be a virtual lock on a Pulitzer Prize.
“I’ll shoot it over to police,” I said.
Mongillo added, “I’m on my way to the scene. I will not get in the way. I will not get in the way. I will not get in the way.”
Rest assured, he was about to get in the way.
Martin said, “Flynn, get your ass in the seat of a plane. I don’t care what it costs.”
Those are words he had never before uttered.
“Peter, are you all right?” I asked.
His tone was calm, but his words were not. “No,” he said. “This story’s about to get a whole lot bigger before it goes away. We’ve all got to be ready for that.”
He was right, as he usually is. We hung up. I threw the car into drive. I still had one more stop to make before the long journey home.
18
I’m trying to remember what life was like before cellular communications, back when we thought the earth was flat and the Celtics would forever be a dynasty and the afternoon paper would always be people’s primary, if not only, source of news. Times change. The NASDAQ, it ends up, can also go down. The Red Sox can win a World Series. And you don’t need to be particularly bright or enlightening to make it as a star political analyst on cable TV.
But where were we before the cell phone, besides listening to eight-track cartridges of Barry White and thinking they’ll never make another show funnier than Laugh-In, which maybe they haven’t, though that’s not really the point. The point was that out here in the Nevada desert, Verizon and all its technological marvels had instilled in me a certain amount of freedom, and I chose to use that freedom to place a call from my rental car to Mac Foley of the Boston PD.
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