by R. G. Belsky
“Dale had some problems,” she said.
“What kind of problems?”
“Mental. Emotional. I realized that at some point. I tried to ignore them, but over time that became harder and harder to do. He had this terrible temper. It would explode suddenly, often for no reason. He’d be acting nice and sweet, and then he’d get angry with me. Later, he would apologize. He told me he didn’t even remember some of the things he said and did when he was in that state. It was almost like he blacked out or something. Turned him into a different person. And then, later, he’d be fine again.”
I knew there was more. I waited for her to tell me. And finally, she did.
“A lot of it was about sex. You see, Dale didn’t like to have just normal sex. He liked to role play. Like he’d captured me and tied me up and forced me to have sex with him. Rough sex, they call it now. Sure, it seemed weird. But it turned him on, and I wanted to do whatever turned Dale Blanchard on. I thought it was fun to play those games, too.
“But then it started to get out of hand. One time he nearly strangled me. We were having sex, and he pretended to put his hands on my throat and squeeze. He began squeezing too hard with his hands until I could barely breathe. He apologized to me afterward and said he didn’t even remember doing it.
“Another time he picked up a pair of scissors and cut me. The same thing happened then afterward—him apologizing, saying he didn’t even know he was doing it. But when he hit me the last time, we were having sex. I decided I had enough. I told Dale I didn’t want to see him again. He was crushed. I think he really loved me. It wasn’t like he had any shortage of girls. Lots of girls wanted him, most of all Becky. He told me Becky had propositioned him again, but he wanted me. I told him to forget about me, I was done with him.”
I wanted to ask her the obvious question. But I didn’t have to. Hartwell asked it herself.
“You want to know if I think Dale Blanchard killed Becky?”
She shook her head no.
“I can’t believe he did it. I know Dale was crazy, he could be violent—but he was basically a good guy. I wouldn’t have stayed with him for as long as I did if I didn’t feel that way. The good always outweighed the bad with Dale as far as I was concerned. I loved him. And he always stopped the rough stuff before he really hurt me when we were together.
“But yes, I thought about the possibility. When I came across Becky’s bloody body that day—and remembered how she was coming on to Dale—I wondered if he could have done it. That he had gotten violent with her, like he did with me. Only this time he didn’t stop until she was dead.
“But I didn’t tell anyone. I couldn’t. I couldn’t tell my parents—or anyone else—that I’d had these violent sex incidents with Dale. Christ, I was seventeen. I’d just discovered my childhood friend and neighbor murdered. I was scared and I was confused.
“Looking back on it now, I guess I had a kind of emotional breakdown. My parents thought it was because of finding Becky dead like that. It was, in part. But all the rest of it, too. So they moved me away from Eckersville and all those memories as quickly as they could, and I never looked back.”
There was a sort of bizarre irony to all this. I’m sure Hartwell realized it, too. This woman had become famous as a radio commentator fighting crime and as a law-and-order political candidate. But she walked away from one of the most sensational murders ever and never told everything she knew about the case.
“Do you think Dale Blanchard was the one who killed Becky Bluso?” I asked her, repeating the question she’d asked herself a few minutes earlier. Only this time her answer was a bit different.
“I don’t know.”
“What’s your gut instinct?”
She sighed.
“I’ve thought about this a lot. Played those events over and over again in my mind. Becky had the hots for Dale, and she knew we’d broken up. She might have invited him to come to her bedroom that day. I’d told her once about the kinky sex games Dale liked to play, and she seemed excited—not horrified—by them. Maybe she wanted to play those games with him, too. And she knew that I was going to meet her there later. Maybe that’s why she invited me. That might have given her a kind of perverse satisfaction for me to find my ex-boyfriend in her arms.
“I’ve thought about other possible scenarios, too. What if the whole thing was a mistake? What if Dale got confused? He used to come to my house and sneak into bed with me. All those houses on Oak Park Drive look alike, you saw that. Becky and I looked a lot alike as well. What if Dale was in one of those confused blackouts he suffered from, went into the wrong house, and somehow thought Becky was me? And, when he found out she wasn’t, he lashed out at her in anger because he thought she was me. I’m not sure. But I still think about stuff like that.”
“And after Becky’s murder you left town?”
“Yes.”
“You never told anyone else your suspicions about Blanchard?”
“Not a soul.”
“Didn’t you think that—if Blanchard did murder Becky in a rage that day—he might kill again?”
“I wasn’t thinking about anything when it happened except running away from it all. And then later … well, you asked me what my gut instinct was? My gut instinct was—and still is, I suppose—that I can’t believe Dale did something like that. I was so messed up that first year or so after we left Eckersville that I never could think clearly about it, I guess. Then I heard that Dale had died. If he was dead, then there was no point in digging up the past. I wanted it all to go away. I never went back to Eckersville or talked with anyone about Becky Bluso again. I wanted to forget Eckersville was ever a part of my life. It had no place in the life I wanted to lead.”
Maybe she was right.
Maybe there was no reason then to go back and find out for sure about Dale Blanchard’s guilt or innocence in Becky Bluso’s murder once he was dead.
But now there was.
Blanchard could be—and I still wasn’t sure how—the key to finding the serial killer we’d dubbed The Wanderer.
I told that to Hartwell.
“I’ve spent my entire life trying to get away from Eckersville—and from being Teresa Lofton,” she said. “Ever since that day I ran away from Becky’s house.”
“It’s time to stop running,” I said.
CHAPTER 51
I STILL HAD a job to do. I was the news director of Channel 10.
I went back there after leaving Hartwell and ran the afternoon news meeting like normal. I picked a hit-and-run fatality in Times Square as our lead story; refereed an argument between Brett and Dani over who got to do the lead-in for it—I guess things weren’t going well for them in the bedroom—and gave some helpful show notes to reporters, including Cassie O’Neal: “This is live TV,” I told her. “That means you have to check your hair before you go on camera.”
I did not tell Jack Faron or anyone else about my conversation with Terri Hartwell. I knew I probably should. I was on shaky ground after screwing up by not telling everyone what I was doing with the FBI on The Wanderer story. But I wasn’t sure exactly what the Terri Hartwell revelations meant or how they fit into the entire Wanderer story, if they even did. I needed more information.
So I went to the place I usually went for information.
“I need you to find out about someone named Dale Blanchard,” I told Maggie in my office after the meeting was over. “He grew up in Eckersville, Indiana. Joined the U.S. Army in 1990. Died in the Army a year later. That’s about all I know.”
“Why do we care about Dale Blanchard?”
“He could be a suspect in the Becky Bluso murder, which—whether it’s connected or not—is still at the top of the list for The Wanderer murders.”
“Who told you he’s a suspect?”
“A source.”
Maggie glared at me. But she didn’t push it this time.
“Okay, I’ve got someone who can check military records for me,” Maggie said. “When do
you need this by?”
“Now,” I said.
She nodded and got up to leave. But before she got to the door, she turned around and hit me with a question I wasn’t ready for.
“What’s going on with you and Weddle anyway?” she asked.
“Nothing’s going on. We’re both doing our jobs. He’s acting like a professional, I’m acting like a professional. There’s been no interaction whatsoever in the office to suggest anything else.”
“I know. It’s weird. Because I thought you two did have some kind of personal relationship. I don’t understand, Clare.”
I didn’t either. I’d thought sleeping with Weddle that night might solve a lot of the questions about our relationship, but—when that didn’t happen—it wound up making things more confused. We’d both kept our distance from each other since that abortive romantic encounter, like two boxers feeling each other out to see what the other one was going to do next. I wasn’t sure exactly what to do, and I think Weddle felt the same way. We’d both responded by reverting to our “professional” approach with each other.
“He seems like a nice guy,” Maggie said.
“He’s a great guy.”
“Then why don’t you two get together?”
“It’s complicated, Maggie.”
“Do you want to talk about it with me?”
“I want to talk about Dale Blanchard,” I told her.
Dale Blanchard had enlisted in the late summer of 1990, a few weeks after Becky Bluso’s murder. Which was interesting. If you wanted to get away to hide out from the scrutiny of the law, the military was a pretty good place to do it.
Blanchard spent eight weeks undergoing basic training at Fort Knox, Kentucky, then another eight weeks of Advanced Infantry Training there. He was assigned to the First Cavalry Division at Fort Hood, Texas. In January of 1991, he was among those sent to Iraq for Desert Storm—the first Iraqi war against Saddam Hussein.
There’d been some problems along the way for Blanchard in the Army. At Fort Knox, he was disciplined for shoving a drill sergeant who had ordered him to do push-ups. He had another physical confrontation with a superior officer at Fort Hood that got him busted from PFC back to Private. And later, he spent two weeks in the stockade for pushing a second lieutenant who didn’t like the way he saluted. Terri Hartwell had sure been right about Blanchard having a temper and flying off the handle easily. Is that what happened with Becky Bluso?
Any chance of us getting an answer from Blanchard to that ended in February 1991, in Iraq.
“Blanchard was in a unit that was clearing out areas of small houses outside Baghdad,” Maggie told me, reading from the notes she’d compiled on her laptop. “Even though the war was very short, there was still fierce resistance from some Republican Guard units and local resistance groups in the area. Blanchard’s unit was going into each house and making sure that it was clear of enemy activity.
“Inside one of the houses, Blanchard and an officer from his unit encountered an enemy soldier who was hiding out there. The enemy soldier saw them before they saw him. He threw a hand grenade into the small room where they were standing.
“The grenade should have killed both Blanchard and the American officer standing next to him. But Blanchard fell on top of the grenade before it exploded and took the full brunt of the blast. The other man was unhurt. Blanchard suffered serious wounds and was medevacked to a hospital, where he lingered for several days in terrible pain before dying.
“There’s no question Blanchard saved the other man’s life by what he did. He received the Army Silver Star medal posthumously. So this guy who might be a murderer wound up being a hero.”
I nodded. I hadn’t been sure what the Blanchard information was going to tell me, and I was even less sure after I heard this. I still didn’t know whether or not he was the person who killed Becky Bluso. And he certainly couldn’t have been The Wanderer who went on to murder all those other women in subsequent years. Unless …
“Are we absolutely certain Dale Blanchard is dead?” I asked Maggie.
“Of course he’s dead. He got the Silver Star medal post-humously.”
“Is there any way he could have faked his death in Iraq?”
“You don’t fake your death in the Army, Clare. He died. He dived on a live grenade, saved another man’s life, and lost his life doing it. The other man said afterward in the reports that Blanchard must have known they both could have been killed if he hadn’t done what he did. He did an incredibly heroic thing. Whatever else you think Blanchard might be responsible for after this—The Wanderer murders or anything else—he didn’t do them.”
She was right. I was grasping at straws. But I’m a journalist. Journalists ask questions like that. I had one more question to ask.
“Who was the other man?” I asked.
“Do you mean the one from his unit whose life was saved?”
“Right.”
“I’m not sure. It’s not in the stuff I have here,” she said, looking down at her notes.
“Let’s find out. Maybe we can interview him. It would be a good story if Blanchard does turn out to be responsible for Becky Bluso’s murder. The absurdity of him being both hero and villain. Dale Blanchard saved one life and took another.”
Maggie nodded, took out her cell phone, and made a few calls. Whatever she found out clearly stunned her by the look on her face. She hung up and then smiled at me.
“You still have your reporter’s instinct to ask the right question, Clare.”
“What did you find out?”
“I’m not sure what’s going on here—but I’ve got the name of the officer from Blanchard’s unit whose life he saved that day in Iraq.”
“Who is he?”
“Russell Danziger,” she said.
CHAPTER 52
IF RUSSELL DANZIGER had been a difficult man for me to reach the first time I tried, it was going to be near-impossible for me to do this time.
He’d stormed out of my office in anger after I lured him there to surreptitiously get his DNA because I thought—wrongly, as it turned out—that he could be the The Wanderer serial killer.
Now he unexpectedly turned up in connection with the man who I suspected murdered the first victim, Becky Bluso. Except, that man could not be The Wanderer either because he died before the other murders took place.
I had absolutely no idea what any of this meant, but I knew that I needed to find out.
I told it all to Terri Hartwell who seemed as stunned as I was by Danziger’s links with Dale Blanchard and Eckersville.
“Danziger never said anything to you about Blanchard or Eckersville?” I asked.
“Not a word.”
“That doesn’t make any sense. He just happened to serve in the Army with the guy you had a romance with in high school? He just happened to donate a large amount of money to build a library in the town of Eckersville where you grew up? And now he works with you on your political campaign? That can’t all be a coincidence.”
I asked her how and when she’d first met Danziger.
“It was several years ago,” she said. “I was starting to do some media stuff, and he approached me one day about helping to manage my career. He was already successful at that point. He’d made a lot of money for himself and other people. I had no idea why he was interested in me, but I jumped at the chance.
“He was the one who helped me get the radio talk show gig. Then he got me big media exposure, big ratings, big money for it. After that, he convinced me to run for the district attorney job. He pulled all the strings and got me elected. Now I’m counting on him for the mayoral race. I owe a lot to Russell Danziger. A whole helluva lot.”
“Did he ever tell you why he decided to … well, pluck you from obscurity and make you a media and political star?” I asked.
“He said it was because I was so talented.”
“And you believed him?”
“What other reason could it have been?”
; “Are you sure he wasn’t romantically interested in you?”
“Like I told you before, I don’t think Russell is romantically interested in anyone.”
“And he never mentioned anything about Eckersville or any of the people there, like Dale Blanchard?”
“I didn’t think he even knew I was from Eckersville. I always just said I grew up in a small Midwestern or Indiana town in my bio material. I never talked about Eckersville. Once I left there, I became Terri Hartwell. That’s the truth.”
I believed her. She hadn’t always told me the whole truth about everything, but then none of us really do. I was pretty sure this was all true though.
“We have to talk to Danziger,” I said.
“We?”
“You and me.”
“He’d never go for that. Not after what happened at your office last time.”
“You gotta try, we have no other choice.”
“Yeah, I know …” she sighed.
Terri Hartwell.
Dale Blanchard.
Eckersville, Indiana.
And now Russell Danziger.
None of this added up for me, no matter how many different ways I tried to approach it.
Terri Hartwell called me back later that day.
“We can meet with Russell Danziger at his apartment in an hour,” Hartwell said.
She gave me an address on Sutton Place and said she’d meet me out front.
“Damn, how did you pull this off so quickly?”
“I can be very persuasive.”
“What did you tell Danziger?”
“You’ll find out when we get there.”
“What do you mean?”
“I didn’t tell him you were going to be with me.”
“Jeez …”
“It was the only way to do it, Clare.”
“Well, this should be interesting. Thanks, I guess.”
“I want to know the answers as much as you do,” Hartwell said.
CHAPTER 53
RUSSELL DANZIGER HAD that angry look on his face again when he opened the door of an apartment on Sutton Place and saw me standing there with Terri Hartwell. The same angry look I’d seen that first day he burst into Hartwell’s office and again when he stormed out of mine at Channel 10. Maybe that was the only look he ever had. Did this guy ever smile?