by R. G. Belsky
Colson looked at the photos in front of her for a long time, then finally pointed at the picture of Danziger.
“It could be him,” she said.
“How sure are you?”
She shook her head.
“He came up behind me. I didn’t see him at first. Then, up in that bedroom, it was dark; the shades were down. Plus, I was scared. and it all happened so quickly. I still have nightmares about it, but I never see his face in the nightmares. I guess I’ve blocked that out.”
“Look at the picture again that you pointed at, Ms. Colson,” one of the agents said to her. “Could that be the man who attacked you nine years ago?”
She nodded.
“It could be.”
“Can you say for sure it was him?”
“It could be,” she repeated.
It wasn’t perfect, but it was a big step forward in the investigation. We had an eyewitness. We had a victim who was still alive. For the first time, we had a case in which The Wanderer had been stopped before he could kill.
So far, everything The Wanderer had done seemed methodical, brilliantly planned, and carried out without a mistake of any kind. But this time, he had messed up. He’d left the victim alive.
The evidence was piling up against Russell Danziger.
Now, we needed to come up with the one bit of key evidence to break this whole case—and my story—wide open.
And I had come up with a plan on how to do that.
But I needed Russell Danziger to make the plan work.
CHAPTER 46
AS IT TURNED out, I didn’t have to look far for Danziger. He found me. Thanks to Terri Hartwell. He strode into my office at Channel 10, sat down without being invited to, and glared at me. He said Hartwell had asked him to meet with me as a special favor to her, and that was the only reason he was here. He clearly was not pleased about it.
“Everything we say is off the record,” Danziger said. “I won’t go on the air, and you can’t quote me about anything on the air. Even as an unnamed source. Whatever we say does not leave this room. Is that understood?”
“That’s fine, Mr. Danziger.”
“And I won’t talk at all—even off the record—to you about Terri Hartwell’s political plans. Not about a run for mayor. Not about any other office. Not even about running for reelection as DA. All political talk about Terri Hartwell is off limits, Ms. Carlson.”
“I’m good with that, too,” I said.
“Then what the hell am I here for? Why did you ask me to come to your office?”
“Because I couldn’t find yours.” I smiled.
Danziger did not smile back. He did not seem like a man who appreciated humor. I had a reason for inviting him, of course. But I couldn’t tell him what it was. I used my cover story instead.
“I’ve heard so much about you that I wanted to meet you, Mr. Danziger. That’s what I told Terri Hartwell when we had dinner. She offered me a job with her. If she does become mayor—and I know we’re not going to talk about that—you’ll presumably be a big player in the city’s government. We’d be working there together. So I wanted to get to know you and find out a bit about you. That’s all.”
Maggie came into the office at this point carrying two cups of coffee. Normally, Maggie would never bring me coffee; she’d tell me to get it myself if I asked her. But she was in on my plan. She handed one coffee cup to me and put the other one down in front of Danziger. I took a big sip of my coffee, hoping it would encourage him to do the same. But he left it untouched in front of him.
“I understand you were in the military,” I said to him. “I respect that. Can we talk about your transition from the Army into the business world?”
He relaxed a bit. Once he started talking, he was quite forthcoming about the Army years. Told me about his rise in the ranks to colonel, about places he’d been on those military assignments. He was less forthcoming, though, about his business career. Or how he went from that to political power broker. I didn’t press him. I was more interested in something else.
I picked up my coffee cup again and took another sip, glancing at him as I did so.
He continued to ignore the coffee in front of him.
“What about family?” I asked. “Children? Where do you live? And, if you don’t mind me asking, why don’t you have a designated office? It makes you awfully hard to find.”
“I do mind you asking,” he said. “None of that is any of your business.”
I nodded and smiled. I told him I understood. I was afraid I was losing him. That he’d jump up and storm out at any minute. I needed to do something before that happened.
“This coffee is really good,” I said, taking another drink from my cup. “Comes from a coffee shop downstairs. Best coffee in town, some people say.”
“Huh?” he said distractedly, still upset by my last questions. “Oh, sure …”
He picked up the cup in front of him and took a drink.
I asked him a few more questions that he didn’t object to. He must have liked the coffee. He took several more sips and emptied the cup as he talked.
I decided it was time to ask him what I really wanted to know.
“Did you ever live in Boca Raton, Mr. Danziger?”
“Boca Raton?”
“Yes. It’s in Florida. North of Miami.”
“I know where it is, but why are you asking me about it?”
“Someone told me you might have lived there some years ago.”
“I’ve never lived in Boca Raton,” he said, looking more confused than angry by the question.
“Okay, let’s move on to another city then. How about Eckersville, Indiana?”
“What?”
“I know you’ve been there. In fact, you donated a huge amount of money to Eckersville for them to build a new library. Tell me about you and Eckersville.”
The confused expression on his face was gone now. Replaced by one of fury. Then came the explosion. He stood up, pounded his fist on my desk, and began yelling at me.
“Is that why you wanted me here? To ask me about Eckersville? I have no idea what you’re trying to do, but I’m not talking to you about Eckersville or anything else. This conversation is over.”
It was a scary scene, and Danziger looked as if he wanted to hit me. The thought crossed my mind that it might not be a great idea to be in a room like this with a man who could be a mass murderer—and make him angry at me. But he didn’t attack. He stormed out of my office, slamming the door so hard behind him that it felt like the walls shook.
That was okay with me.
Because I’d accomplished what I wanted with Russell Danziger.
I’d discussed it all beforehand with Manning. The FBI couldn’t formally question Danziger. They couldn’t demand a sample of his DNA to compare with the DNA from the killer found at the crime scenes. They didn’t have enough evidence. But I could do that without him knowing. By getting him to leave his DNA on something. Then, if his DNA matched the killer’s, the FBI could go after him through their normal channels.
I looked down at the coffee cup Danziger had left behind on my desk.
The one I’d gotten him to drink out of.
I had Russell Danziger’s DNA on the coffee cup.
CHAPTER 47
EVERYTHING I WAS doing on this story was now falling into place perfectly. Every move I made was getting me closer and closer to breaking one of the biggest exclusive serial killer stories of all time.
And then it all exploded in my face.
I knew something was wrong when the phone in my apartment rang at 7:20 a.m. as I was getting ready for work. The caller ID said it was Jack Faron. Faron didn’t normally call me at home this early to tell me what a great job I was doing. He called when there was something wrong.
“Turn on the Today show,” he barked.
I already had the TV on, but I’d muted it while I was getting dressed. I grabbed the remote now, switched the channel to NBC, and turned up the soun
d.
The Today show usually featured soft news—cooking segments, celebrity interviews, health workouts. But there were no cooking or workouts or celebrities on the screen. Instead, it was a woman reporter, whom I recognized from NBC Nightly News, standing in front of FBI headquarters in Lower Manhattan.
“Once again on this breaking story,” she was saying, “NBC News has learned exclusively that the FBI believes a serial killer is responsible for numerous murders of young women across the country over a long period of time. Possibly as many as twenty murders over thirty years. The FBI Behavioral Sciences Unit inside this building has set up a special task force in an effort to identify and apprehend the killer, whom they refer to as ‘The Wanderer.’ We’ll have more on this breaking, exclusive story throughout the day and tonight on the NBC Nightly News. This is Leslie Gabbert reporting from FBI headquarters in New York City.”
“Damn. Damn. Damn,” I muttered into the phone as I watched.
“My sentiments, too,” Faron said. “You said this was our story, Clare. You said we should hold it, work with the FBI, and then break the whole thing from inside the investigation. I listened to you. I wanted to go with the story right away, but you convinced me to wait. And now we’re screwed. Chasing after our own exclusive. What the hell went wrong?”
I had a pretty good idea about what had happened. Gregory Wharton—or one of the other agents on the FBI task force—had leaked it to a friendly reporter at NBC News. This Leslie Gabbert woman. They never wanted me as part of their investigation, and this was their payback. They knew the story would come out sooner or later from me, but this way they could control it. Control the timing and the details of what was made public. And, I was certain, their story would give virtually all the credit for uncovering the link between The Wanderer murders to the FBI—not to me or to Marty or to Channel 10.
“I’m on my way into the office,” I said.
“You better be. I won’t be there when you get in. I’m on my way to Brendan Kaiser’s office to try to explain to our station’s owner how we got scooped on our own story. I’d been keeping him appraised of the details from you, which he’s now watching on another channel. I hope I still have a job when I’m finished with Kaiser. I hope we both do.”
“I’m sorry, Jack,” I said. I couldn’t think of anything else to say. “I’m sorry about this. It’s my fault, no one else’s. I’ll take the blame. Tell Kaiser that for me.”
Faron didn’t answer.
Then I heard a dial tone.
He’d hung up on me.
I tried calling Manning. Then Wharton. Then other members of the FBI task force if I had their number. No one answered. Maybe they were busy. Or, more likely, they were avoiding me.
The Channel 10 newsroom was in full crisis mode by the time I got there.
At the morning news meeting, everyone now knew the details about what had happened. They were all furious. Mad at Leslie Gabbert. Mad at NBC. But mostly, mad at me for working on the story for so long without telling anyone—except Maggie and Faron—what I was doing.
“Don’t you trust us, Clare?” Brett Wolff wanted to know. “We’re supposed to be a team. A news team. But you went off and worked on this story on your own, without any input from the rest of us. That’s inexcusable. And, what’s even worse, you screwed it up!”
Lots of other people chimed in then with the same message for me. There were no jokes, no wisecracks at this news conference. Me, I sat there and took it all without making any effort to defend myself. There was no defense. Everyone was right. I had screwed up this story, and I had no one to blame but myself for it.
But, like journalists do when they get beat on a story, the talk eventually turned to what we could do next. How we could catch up on this story. How we were going to play it on the Channel 10 News later.
I explained that I would go on air myself to deliver a report about everything we knew. I’d play up the angle about being inside the investigation the whole time. I’d say that we withheld the story in cooperation with the FBI. I’d include a lot of background and details that I knew about The Wanderer and his murders.
“Still sounds lame,” Brett said.
“Yeah, like we’re playing catch-up,” Dani said.
“We are playing catch-up,” someone muttered.
“Anyone else have any other suggestions?” I asked, looking around the room.
“We need something new,” Maggie said. “Something exclusive about the story to make it our story again. Do you have anything else at all, Clare?”
I did. The Russell Danziger angle. There had been no mention of Danziger on the NBC report. Not surprising. There wasn’t enough evidence yet to link him to the murders. But I had evidence. Or at least I hoped to have evidence. All I had to do was get confirmation from Scott Manning that Danziger’s DNA—which I’d secretly obtained from him that day in my office from the coffee cup—matched the DNA left behind by the killer at the crime scenes. Then we could break it exclusively on Channel 10. A big exclusive. Big enough to blow The Wanderer story wide open. Big enough for everyone to stop being so pissed off at me and maybe save my career, too.
“I’m working on an angle,” I said.
When I finally reached Manning, he was almost as upset as I was about the leak to NBC. He insisted he knew nothing about it. I believed him. I was certain it had been Wharton or one of the others on the task force who had stabbed me in the back by going to NBC News. But that wasn’t my priority right now. My priority was nailing Russell Danziger.
“Scott, I need those DNA results. I need them now, like by this afternoon so I can break something on our 6 p.m. newscast that doesn’t sound like we’re chasing NBC on the story. I need to be able to talk about Danziger, too.”
“I’ve got the DNA samples,” Manning said.
“Thank God!” I exhaled deeply into the phone.
“You’re not going to like the results.”
I knew what he was going to tell me next, even before he said it. Everything had been going right for me on this story until today, and now it was all going horribly wrong.
“The DNA doesn’t match, Clare.”
“But …”
“Russell Danziger is not The Wanderer.”
CHAPTER 48
SO WHAT DID I go on the air with now?
I still needed to come up with something different about The Wanderer in the wake of the shocking news that I’d been chasing the wrong man in Russell Danziger. I needed something else that would set apart our coverage at Channel 10 from the NBC exclusive and all the other media playing catch-up right now.
Oh, I could play up the fact that I was inside the investigation. That I had the story first, that I was working with the FBI right from the beginning. But that then brought up the question: Why didn’t I break the story myself, instead of waiting for NBC News to do it? It was a reasonable question. One that I had no good answer for.
I finally decided that the best exclusive angle I had—the only one—was the Becky Bluso murder. I’d gone to Eckersville. I’d talked to the police chief there about the murder investigation. I’d toured the house where the murder took place. And I’d gone to Maine to interview Betty Bluso, the only surviving member of the Bluso family, about her sister’s long-ago murder.
Sure, the Bluso murder was the only one where no definitive DNA or any other kind of evidence existed to it being connected with the other murders. But Marty had obviously believed it was. In all likelihood, it was his investigation of the Becky Bluso case that led him to all the other murders on his list. He’d put her picture at the top of all the victims of the murders. And he’d made her picture bigger than any of the others. I was pretty sure I could pull off the idea that Becky Bluso was possibly—even likely to have been—The Wanderer’s first murder. Which I continued to believe, too, despite the lack of hard evidence.
The one thing I couldn’t use on the air was the revelation that Russell Danziger had donated big money to the Eckersville lib
rary. No way I could link Danziger to the story now. I still didn’t understand what Danziger was doing in Eckersville or why he cared so much about the damn library or the Bluso murder case. But since he wasn’t the killer—and the DNA results confirmed this—it didn’t matter much anymore.
I spent the hours before the 6 p.m. broadcast going over all the stuff I’d found out in Eckersville about Becky Bluso’s murder. I reached out to the police chief, Jeff Parkman, and got him to agree to do video footage in front of the old Bluso house—and also give sound bites to a local crew I sent there to shoot for us. I did the same thing with Becky’s sister, Betty, who agreed to a video interview with us from her office at the college in Maine about Becky’s long-ago murder.
I also pored over my notes from the time I was in Eckersville, looking for someone else—anyone else—I could interview. But I realized that most everyone else was dead. Everyone in Becky’s family except for the older sister. So was the neighbor who had been at the barbecue with the Blusos the night before the murder. And his troubled son who police thought might be a suspect—but never could get enough evidence to arrest—had died in a car crash years ago.
Going over it all again, I was struck by the story of Teresa Lofton, the neighborhood friend who had discovered Becky’s body. Parkman said she’d been so traumatized that she and her family moved away from the area soon afterward. I could only imagine how that could affect a teenager.
I’d never tried to track down Teresa Lofton. Everybody said she’d just disappeared after stumbling onto the horrific murder scene of her friend Becky, and no ever knew what happened to her. “Teresa Lofton?” Betty Bluso said when I asked her about it on the phone before we did our interview for the show. “No, I have no idea about Teresa. I tried to reach out to her after Becky’s murder. But she never returned my phone calls or showed up at Becky’s funeral. Everyone says she was so devastated by what she saw that she had some kind of an emotional breakdown. Her parents took her away from Eckersville right afterward, and that was the last I ever heard of her.”