He paused. I said nothing. He continued, “They found Kimberly May’s driver’s license in one of his dresser drawers.”
Kimberly May being the third victim, the one identified via the video taken by her killer in her apartment.
I reflexively drew a deep breath, and in Harrison’s brief, intentional, and dramatic silence, I quickly tried to sort through my feelings. First, I was thrilled to be in possession of this nugget, which could probably take over the lede of my story. This essentially and truly implicated one of the most respected homicide detectives in Boston, all based on my initial tip.
The second emotion I felt was relief, that maybe, really, truly, the Phantom Fiend was caught and would spend the rest of his life behind bars, never to torment my city, or me, for that matter, ever again.
The third emotion, and this is where the reporter side of me rears its occasionally ugly but often pragmatic head, was doubt. I just didn’t, couldn’t, maybe wouldn’t believe that Mac Foley was involved in the murders of three young women now, and perhaps eleven victims from forty years before. It wasn’t that I liked him so much. It wasn’t even that I knew him. I just had this nagging sense that there was something — or maybe someone — else involved.
The facts, of course, belied my intuition. Mac Foley with Elizabeth Riggs’s purse. Mac Foley with knowledge of Lauren Hutchens’s apartment number. Now Mac Foley with Kimberly May’s license. Much as I was hesitant to believe it, the raw details made for an excellent newspaper story.
“Right now, we’re charging him with interfering with an investigation,” Harrison began anew. “That gives us the ability to hold him. We’ll seek high bail from a judge, get a DNA sample, and compare that with possible samples from the crime scenes. Again, you can use this, but not for attribution. We’re scheduling a full press conference for tomorrow morning.”
By now I was jotting notes down. Mongillo was still spewing into his phone, alternately laughing and uttering exclamations like “C’mon, zip it back up.” At another point, his tone got deadly serious and he said to whoever it was on the other end of the line, “This one’s personal to me. My mother was one of the victims all those years ago.”
I thanked Harrison, hung up the phone, and stared out the front windshield through the raw March night at the hulking house that held Paul Vasco, who suddenly didn’t seem all that relevant to my story.
Or did he. Something just kept telling me he was. Maybe it was the photographs of the victims on Vasco’s wall. Maybe it was that satanic smile of his when he talked about the crimes. Maybe it was the look on Foley’s face, one of desperation, but perhaps one of honor as well.
Before you destroy my life, before you ruin what’s left of my career, before you destroy my wife, my daughter, my whole reputation, please put it to Paul Vasco.
Mongillo hung up the phone.
“You get what I get?” I asked.
“The license?”
I nodded and asked, “A good source?”
Now he nodded.
I snapped open the cell phone and dialed Peter Martin, who answered, as always, on the first ring. I relayed the information. I read him a quote that was to be attributed to a law enforcement official involved in the investigation. His tone was nearly giddy as he hung up to make the changes for the paper’s next edition.
Mongillo nodded toward the darkened house that loomed over our car. “Still worthwhile?” he asked.
“Something tells me it is,” I said. We both opened the doors at the same time.
Just like on our visit two days before, the front door was unlocked, and the downstairs lobby, such as it is, was unguarded.
Vinny and I made our way up the dark staircase and walked along the decrepit wooden floors on the second story until we arrived simultaneously in front of Paul Vasco’s door. I reached out and softly knocked.
Inside, I heard movement, and judging from the slight squint he gave, so did Mongillo, but no one answered the door. So I knocked again, this time more firmly. More noise, like a muffled shuffling, but still Vasco didn’t come to the door.
I knocked a third time, a firm rap now, which was met by utter silence. Mongillo put his face against the door and called out, “Paul, it’s Vinny Mongillo and Jack Flynn. Can you let us in for a minute?”
Nothing. So I tried the knob. It was open. I mean, think about that for a moment. The door was open — in a halfway house filled with supposedly reforming criminals. Shocked doesn’t begin to describe how I felt. Neither does pleased.
I looked at Mongillo; he held up a single fat finger, and I’m pretty sure we were both thinking the same thing. If we walked into this room, we would at that point be trespassing, and Paul Vasco, a convicted killer with a confessed lust for the act of murder, could rightfully gun us down in our woeful tracks. A jury would not only acquit him, it’d probably award him damages for the pain and suffering of having a couple of jerk reporters mucking around in his life.
I shut my eyes for a second, furiously trying to figure out a course of action. Vinny motioned for me to slowly push open the door, which I did, a crack, and Vinny called out, “Paul, it’s Jack and Vinny. We need to come in for a second. Is that all right?”
No sounds, no movement, no answer.
So I edged the door open another few inches. Mongillo looked at me and I motioned him aside. I stepped through the narrow opening, my arm first, figuring if that was shot off, I still had another. Then a leg. Same theory.
“Paul, it’s Jack Flynn. I really need to see you.”
And then my face. One hard bulb illuminated the room, and what I saw was absolutely no one. That is, until I saw the shoe resting on its side, half under the bed — a workboot, actually, with dried mud caked on the treads of its soles.
It’s funny how the mind works in a crisis, or at least under pressure. It’s funny how the dots connect faster, how the synapses fire harder, how every sense is cut and clean and grabbing at every little detail it can find, and even some it can’t. A mere shoe. Paul Vasco, I quickly understood, did not have an extra pair of shoes. You don’t come out of prison like Imelda Marcos, carrying a duffel bag full of various pairs of shoes — the loafers for a lazy Sunday afternoon, the workboots for the week, the sandals for those times at the beach when nothing else will do. No, if the shoes were here, then so was Vasco, so I called out, “Paul, I just have another quick question for you. There’s been a break in the case that I think you’re going to be interested in.”
As I said this, I eyed the boot carefully, though at the moment I wasn’t sure why. And then I was. Connected to the boot was a sock. I’m no Sherlock Holmes, hell, I’m not even Columbo, but the sock, I deducted, covered an ankle. The ankle belonged to a person hiding under the bed. The person hiding under the bed was undoubtedly Paul Vasco.
I stepped back, beckoned Vinny into the room with my hand, gave him the shut-up sign by placing a finger to my lip, and said aloud, “We missed him. He’s not here. Let’s get back to the newsroom, fast.”
Granted, I probably wasn’t ready for my Broadway debut, but I didn’t think this was bad.
I motioned Vinny out the door now. He left. I carefully stepped up on the one wooden chair in the room, summoning every bit of my athletic ability to remain as silent as I could. I leaned over and shut the door firmly.
My thinking was as follows: If I assumed that Paul Vasco was armed, and I had to assume that Paul Vasco was armed because it seemed like every single person I’d come across in the last week was armed, then I wanted to grab him while he was undertaking the awkward motion of emerging from under the bed.
Something else also pecked at my suspicions as well, and it was as simple as this: Why was Vasco hiding? And what did he have to hide?
I quite literally held my breath. Thirty seconds passed, and the boot didn’t move. Sixty seconds passed, still nothing. I let out little breaths through my nose and sucked in air through my mouth. I began to think he knew I was there. Either that or maybe sometimes a boot i
s just a boot, and all my deductive reasoning was out the window.
Two minutes in, I was furiously contemplating my next move. Do I look under the bed and risk being shot in the head? Do I simply grab at the boot? Do I step down from my makeshift pedestal and leave? And that’s when the boot moved, not anything subtle, but it virtually rolled over, and then a hand emerged from beneath the bed, grabbing at the top of the mattress, pulling the rest of the body out.
The form fully emerged from under the bed, facing away from me, still having no idea I was in the room. He was carrying something in his hand that wasn’t a gun. It looked like a sheath of paper. I had no time to think, let alone strategize. So what I did was pounce.
I leapt off the chair and on top of the guy’s back, slamming him down against the side of the bed, and then the floor. He let out a long, hard groan. I grabbed his neck in a headlock and slammed my fist into his gut. I’m not sure why I did this. Maybe it was all the violence that had touched me over the last week. Maybe it was rubbing off. I wouldn’t be telling the whole truth about this situation if I didn’t say it felt a little bit good.
Amid the cacophony, Vinny Mongillo flung open the door and raced into the room.
“Grab Vasco’s legs!” I yelled to him. I didn’t want the guy somehow kicking some particularly sensitive part of me while I tried to hold him down.
“I can’t,” Vinny replied.
I continued to hold Vasco down, his head facing away from me as his body furiously squirmed in an attempt to get free. “Why the hell not?” I asked, looking up at Mongillo.
“Because Vasco’s not here. This isn’t him.”
I pushed the guy away from me, down onto the floor. He had long, stringy hair, an unkempt beard that was born of nothing more than laziness, and needle marks up and down his skeletal arms. He was looking at me wide-eyed, truly frightened, and he blurted out in a panicked tone, “Vasco’s gone. He told me I could take some of this stuff. He really did.” I noticed for the first time that the sheath of papers, now strewn across the floor, was a collection of pornographic photos that the guy had obviously pulled off the wall.
I clenched my fist, raised it in the air, and said, “Where is he? Where’s Vasco?”
The guy blinked long and hard in anticipated pain and said, “He took the train. I don’t know where he went.”
“How do you know he was on the train?”
“I was with him when he left.”
The guy was still on the ground, his head raised a few inches off the filthy floor. I was kneeling above him. Mongillo stood behind me.
Mongillo barked, “When?”
“This morning. We went to the train station this morning. We were supposed to be going to work together for the first day, and he said he had somewhere else he needed to go.”
“Which train station?” I asked.
“I don’t know.”
I clenched my fist harder, causing him to flinch. They probably don’t teach this interview technique at Columbia University’s ever-famous journalism graduate school, but nor do they probably teach young reporters-to-be what they’re supposed to do when everyone around them keeps dying. Or maybe they do; I don’t really know. I barely got a bachelor’s degree.
I asked, “How the fuck do you not know?”
“I don’t know this city, man. I don’t. I’m from Detroit. I really don’t know.”
Mongillo and I remained silent for a moment, both our minds rushing to devise our next step. In the quiet, I glanced over at the wall that held the photographs of Jill Dawson, Lauren Hutchens, and Kimberly May, and saw with a start that their pictures were no longer there. I scanned the floor quickly, and they weren’t there either. I don’t know why this was important to me, the fact these pictures were missing, but it was.
“You’re coming with us,” I said, grabbing him by the front of his dirty white T-shirt and lifting him up.
“I can’t, dude. I can’t.”
I hate the word dude, though that’s not entirely why I clenched my fist once again, gritted my teeth, and whispered to him, “If you don’t, I’m going to kill you.”
“I need a fix.”
Mongillo, intuitively and literally understanding where we were going with this, said, “We’ll get you one — right after.”
I asked, “What’s your name?”
“Marcus.”
“Marcus, we’re going to go for a little ride, and as soon as we’re done, we’ll set you up with whatever you need.”
He nodded, hopeful for the first time in this encounter. The three of us walked out of the room, down the dark, dingy hall, down the stairs, and out into the street. He wasn’t wearing a jacket; I didn’t particularly care.
The goal was to retrace their route. I’m not completely certain why this was so important to me, but it falls in the same category as conducting an interview in person rather than by phone. You always get more from facial expressions, from body language, from being in the same room. You always get more from just showing up.
In the car, Vinny got in the driver’s seat and I sat in the back beside Marcus, with my man Huck squishing over against the door. Before we pulled out, we discerned that Marcus and Vasco had walked to a subway stop. The subway stop was next to where the Celtics played, which meant North Station. They did not switch subway lines. They did not take the subway directly to the train station. They got off the subway and came aboveground at a busy intersection with a large park, then walked to the train station behind a tall glass skyscraper.
I said to Vinny, “Sounds like they took the Green Line to Arlington Street, and walked to Back Bay Station. But why the hell didn’t they just take the Orange Line from North Station right into Back Bay Station?”
Mongillo said, “Maybe Vasco doesn’t know the subway lines well.”
“He’s a genius.” I paused and said, “Drive over to Arlington Street.”
We did. Marcus said it looked familiar. I started feeling like I should work for Scotland Yard. He pointed in the direction they walked, which was toward the train station, and Vinny slowly followed the route.
Marcus, sleepy now rather than feisty, pointed casually out the window and said, “Paul went in there.”
It was a Kinko’s copy store, still open because it was always open.
“He stopped in there?” I asked, incredulous. “For long?”
“No. Five minutes.”
“Then where?”
Marcus said, “We went to the train station.”
I insisted on following the route. It was ten-thirty at night; the streets were virtually void of traffic, giving us the luxury of driving at our own slow pace.
Marcus said, “We took a left here.”
Vinny banged a sharp left, down the wrong way of a one-way street, but that’s all right. What wasn’t all right was that it suddenly didn’t make complete sense, this route, because it took them a block out of their way.
“Marcus, think hard. Where else did you stop?” I said.
“Nowhere. That was it.”
Vinny pulled up to the next intersection, driving the wrong way.
“Think, Marcus. Any little stop. Any short detour. Think.”
Marcus casually pointed out the window and said, “Right there, but just for a second.”
I whirled around in my seat. He was pointing at a U.S. post office, the Back Bay annex. Suddenly things started fitting together in my head like they never had before, pieces creating a whole, the whole being a picture of Paul Vasco mailing a letter to me because he was the Phantom Fiend, and probably the Boston Strangler.
“What happened?” I asked, nearly yelling. Huck sat up for the first time.
Marcus was staring out the back window at the post office. Vinny had pulled to the curb. “Paul handed me an envelope. The building was closed. There were three mailboxes on the sidewalk, and he told me to go put it in the middle mailbox. He said he’d give me twenty dollars if I did. He kept walking toward the train station.”
; I asked, “Did you mail it?”
He nodded. “Then I had to run after him. I met him outside the station. He gave me the money, said he had to take another trip, and told me to get to work and not tell anyone what we had done.”
I let out a long breath. Vinny looked back at me and I looked at Vinny. I reached into my pocket, pulled out a pair of twenty dollar bills, handed them to Marcus, and said, “You’re a man of your word. Thanks for your help. Don’t tell anyone about us.”
“I won’t,” he said as he got out of the car, looking back nervously as he shut the door.
I snapped open my cell phone and dialed Peter Martin. “You’ve got to hold that Mac Foley story,” I said. “I think we’re wrong.”
Martin replied, “You think, or you’ve got something else you can write in its place?”
Good question, as usual.
“Give me an hour,” I said, having only some idea just what an hour it would be.
41
At ten forty-five on a raw Sunday night in the middle of a dismal March, the Pigpen lounge in Chelsea was exactly how I expected it to be, which is to say peopled by some of life’s most exquisite losers — beer-bellied guys with tree-trunk necks wearing ill-fitting black blazers, desperate-looking women in caked-on makeup with skirts that revealed things that no normal man would want to see, coked-out servers who had neither showered nor shaved in days.
The place reeked of stale cigarettes, cheap whiskey, and fresh urine, not necessarily in that order. That potpourri actually represented an improvement on the drugstore-quality colognes and perfumes worn by the patrons. If Charles Darwin had ever been able to stop by the Pigpen for a Scotch and a beer chaser, I think he’d have quickly remade his entire theory.
I marched through the front doors and yelled out, “Everyone freeze. Massachusetts Health Department. I’m here to enforce the state’s no-smoking laws.”
Actually, that’s not what I did or said. I didn’t have the luxury of time or humor. Rather, I barged inside, spied old friend Sammy Markowitz sitting in his usual rear booth, and made a beeline for him.
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