The Last Scoop

by R. G. Belsky

  “What’s she doing here?” he said to Hartwell, talking about me as if I weren’t there. “I don’t want to see her. She has to go.”

  “We need to talk to you, Russell, about something very important.”

  “I’ll talk to you, not her,” he said, this time at least acknowledging my presence with a nod in my direction.

  “We both need to talk to you.”

  “About what?”

  “Dale Blanchard.”

  I thought he might slam the door on both of us. But he didn’t. He seemed to have a strange connection with Terri Hartwell that I still didn’t quite understand. I wondered if he really was in love with her, even though he’d never acted on it. Or at least as much in love as someone as repressed and narcissistic as Danziger could be. In any case, he let us inside. Both of us.

  The apartment was breathtakingly large. Hell, the foyer we were standing in at the moment was as big as my entire apartment. I had no idea how many rooms were in the place, but it must have been a lot. He led us into the living room, which had panoramic views of the East River and the 59th Street Bridge. Expensive-looking furniture, carpets, and paintings filled the room. There was a huge TV screen on the wall tuned to CNN. This was quite a life Russell Danziger had built for himself. And now I was here to maybe take it all apart.

  “What do you want to know about Dale Blanchard?” he asked after we sat down.

  “What was your relationship with him?” Hartwell asked.

  “We were in the Army together.”

  “Yes.”

  “And that’s all?” I asked.

  “No, there’s more. Blanchard saved my life in Iraq. He fell on top of a live grenade that was about to rip us both apart. It cost him his life, and—because of that—I got to live mine. But you already knew all that, didn’t you?”

  “Did you donate a large amount of money to build a library in Blanchard’s hometown of Eckersville, Indiana?”

  “Yes, I did. You know that, too.”

  “You really spent all that money in honor of Dale Blanchard?” Hartwell said.

  “Well, the man did save my life.”

  “So why didn’t you put his name on the library plaque, instead of yours?” I asked him.

  Danziger shrugged. “I guess I just have this lust to be in the spotlight of public attention and adoration.” He sort of grinned when he said that. It was a strange-looking grin. I wasn’t sure if it was better or worse than his usual angry expression, but at least it was different.

  “Let’s cut through all the BS to get to the real truth here, Mr. Danziger,” I said. “Dale Blanchard was from Eckersville. Terri Hartwell grew up in Eckersville as Teresa Lofton. Teresa Lofton had a romance with Dale Blanchard in high school. Blanchard saved your life in Iraq, then he died. You later show up out of the blue to introduce yourself to Hartwell and catapult her media and political career. Those are the facts. Now you need to connect the dots for us and tell the goddamned truth!”

  Danziger got off the couch where he was sitting and began walking toward us. I wondered if he actually was going to throw us out this time. He was a big man; he might even hit me. But instead he walked past Hartwell and me toward a desk in the corner, opened a drawer, and took out a picture.

  He came back and showed the picture to us. It was him and several soldiers at a base camp in Iraq. Hartwell let out an involuntary gasp when she saw the face of one of the soldiers. So I knew it was Blanchard. He was very handsome with a rakish look on his face as he held a can of beer up to the camera. I could see why a young Terri Hartwell had been so enamored with him in high school.

  “That picture was taken a few weeks before the grenade attack happened,” Danziger said. “I didn’t know him well then. I was a major and he was an enlisted man. He was just another soldier in my unit to me. I had no idea he would become the most important person I ever met in my life.”

  Danziger put the picture down, but he kept looking at it as he talked.

  “Everything in a war is magnified. Sometimes things which at first seem to be insignificant turn out to be totally life changing. Or life ending, as it happened for Blanchard. I mean me and my men had gone into hundreds of buildings like that one without anything ever going wrong. But then, in an instant, everything went wrong.

  “I don’t know if Blanchard even had time to think about what he did. Or if he would have done the same thing if he had had time to think. Or if I would have done the same thing for him, if I’d been the one closest to the live grenade. I still think about that. I have ever since that day in 1991, and I do to this day.

  “When George Bush died—the one who was president during the first Gulf War I fought in—the obits talked a lot about his heroic service in World War II. About how his plane was shot down—he survived, but the other two men in his plane were killed. Bush had told people that he still thought about those two men every day of his life, too, like I do with Blanchard. Most people can’t understand something like that because they’ve never been to war. But I have, and I do understand. There isn’t a day that goes by in my life where I don’t still think about what Dale Blanchard did for me. I got to live my life, but he never did.”

  Then he told us about going to see Blanchard in the Army hospital before he died of his wounds.

  “He was in terrible pain and pumped up on drugs. He knew he was dying. There were no words I could say to thank him for what he had done, but I thanked him anyway. He asked me if I could do something important for him. I, of course, said yes.

  “He said if I ever had the opportunity to do something to help the town of Eckersville, I should do it for him. He said he’d done something bad back in Eckersville and wanted to make amends, as best he could. But he said it had to be anonymous. He didn’t deserve to get credit for anything because … well, he said because what he’d done back then was too horrible for that. He just wanted to do the right thing.

  “Then he also asked me to look after a girl named Teresa Lofton, who he called the ‘love of his life.’ But I couldn’t tell her that either. He said he loved her more than anything, but he had hurt her. Now he wanted to make up for that, too. He made me promise to look after Teresa Lofton, whenever I could. But not to tell her anything about why I was doing it, either. He said he didn’t deserve a girl like Teresa Lofton. I said I’d do my best. Dale Blanchard died not long afterward.”

  I looked over at Terri Hartwell. There was a look of shock on her face. And, unless I was mistaken, tears welling up in her eyes. She clearly was emotionally affected by all this, even thirty years later. You never forget your first love, she’d told me. Hartwell’s first love had been Dale Blanchard. No matter what he might have done, some of that feeling for him still endured. And she was finding out for the first time that his last thoughts, his last words, had been about her. I think at that moment she was seventeen-year-old Teresa Lofton again, not Terri Hartwell.

  “Everything I’ve accomplished, every moment of my life that I’ve enjoyed since then … it’s all because of what Dale Blanchard did that day in Iraq,” Danziger said. “I wouldn’t be sitting here today if it weren’t for Dale Blanchard. I owe him—and his memory—a debt I can never repay. But I’ve tried.

  “At first, I wasn’t able to do much in those ensuing years because I was in the Army, moving around to different assignments and locations. And I wasn’t a wealthy man then. But I never forgot about Blanchard and my promise to him. That’s why—when I left the Army and started making big money in my business enterprises—I made that donation to the Eckersville library.

  “And I’d followed Teresa Lofton over the years,” he said, looking over at Hartwell, “as she got married, had children, and moved ahead in her career. That’s when I decided to help her even more, to look after her the way I had promised Blanchard I would. It’s been a relationship that’s been beneficial to both of us. But I never told her how and why it all started. Because that’s what Dale Blanchard asked me to do. I’ve kept my word on that. Until tod
ay.”

  “You said Dale told you he’d done something bad back in Eckersville,” I said to Danziger. “Something he wanted to try and make up for. Did he tell you what he did that was so bad?”

  “No, I have no idea what it was.”

  “Did he confess to you on his deathbed that he had murdered a young woman named Becky Bluso? Is that why you asked questions about the Bluso murder when you went to Eckersville, and even visited the crime site?”

  “I don’t know anything about that.”

  Russell Danziger sure was a bizarre guy. A man who had repressed all emotions or kindness or human feelings over the years. Probably because his own father had done the same thing to him. But yet he had this emotional attachment to Dale Blanchard, who had been dead for thirty years. And, by extension, with Terri Hartwell, the woman Blanchard had loved and asked him to take care of. It sounded crazy to me. But maybe if someone saved your life in a war, you looked at things differently. Now I had to hope he still had one bit of decent human emotion left in him. I needed Russell Danziger to do the right thing here.

  I took out a printout with the pictures of all the women we believed were victims of The Wanderer.

  “These women have been murdered since Becky Bluso,” I said. “We thought at first it was done by the same person that murdered Becky Bluso. That’s apparently not the case now. But I still think all these murders are connected somehow. And the killer is still out there. Tell us everything Dale Blanchard told you about Becky Bluso before he died. Maybe there’s something there that could help us find the answers. I know you promised to keep Dale Blanchard’s secrets for him. And I know how important that is to you. But other women are being killed besides Becky Bluso. Maybe if you tell us what you know—all of it you found out from Blanchard in that hospital—we can bring some kind of justice for these crimes. And hopefully prevent any more women from dying.”

  Danziger stared at the pictures—the faces of the dead women—for a long time. I asked him the same question again.

  “Did Blanchard confess to you on his deathbed that he was the one who murdered Becky Bluso?” I asked.

  He nodded. Almost imperceptibly at first. But it was a nod.

  “He didn’t mean to do it, Dale told me. He didn’t even know why he did it. It just happened. Something in him snapped, he said. He’d been angry and depressed about losing you, Terri. When Becky Bluso invited him into her bedroom, she looked so much like you that, at first, he began fantasizing he was with you again, he said. He didn’t remember any of the details. Just that he’d tied up Bluso on the bed and began playing games with a knife—like he used to do with you. He said he blacked out. When he became conscious again of what was around him, he saw what he had done. He’d carried all that guilt with him ever since then. And now, when he knew he was dying, I guess it was important to him to tell someone. I never told anyone after he died. Becky Bluso was dead, and now so was he. I wanted him to die remembered as a hero, not as a murderer.”

  “Are you the only person he ever told about killing Becky Bluso?” I asked.

  Danziger was silent now.

  “Mr. Danziger?”

  “He said there was someone else who knew about it.”

  “Who?”

  “Someone in Eckersville. Another student at the high school. He got drunk one night and told the kid about it. He freaked out the next morning when he sobered up and realized what he had done. He figured the guy would report him to the police. But that never happened. Dale never understood why the guy didn’t go to the authorities.”

  “Did he tell you the name of this other student?”

  “No, I don’t know the name.”

  “Didn’t you ask him?”

  “Dale died before I could do that.”

  CHAPTER 54

  THE NEXT DAY Scott Manning and I were on a plane to Indiana.

  “Okay, this guy Blanchard kills Becky Bluso in a crazy moment and tells another kid at school about it,” Manning said, repeating the facts I’d given to him after leaving Danziger. “Only the other kid never tells anyone. Or reports it to the police. Why? What does he do next?”

  “Maybe he starts killing women, too.”

  “You think Blanchard kills the first one, then the other guy keeps doing it with the rest after Blanchard goes into the Army and dies?”

  “That is a plausible theory. It explains why the DNA results were similar in all the crimes except the first one, Becky Bluso.”

  “Seems like a reach to me, Clare. Just because this other student knew about Blanchard doing the Bluso murder—and didn’t say anything—doesn’t mean he’d begin murdering women on his own. Hell, Danziger knew about Blanchard and Becky Bluso, too, and he’s not The Wanderer.”

  “We know that now because of the DNA results.”

  “What you’re saying is all we have to do is find this other guy, somehow get him to admit to us that Blanchard told him about murdering Bluso, obtain his DNA, and maybe even get him to confess to all the other murders and being one of the worst serial killers in history?”

  I nodded. “It should be easy.”

  “Do you have any idea how many students must have gone to Eckersville High School back in 1990 when Becky Bluso was murdered?”

  “One thousand four hundred and fifty-one. I checked before we left.”

  “Assuming half of them are male, that’s seven hundred possible suspects we need to track down and question.”

  “At least.”

  “Most of them have probably left Eckersville and are living in other parts of the country or the world.”

  “Likely.”

  “Some of them will be dead.”

  “Also, likely.”

  “And a whole lot of others won’t want to talk to us or won’t remember much of anything about a guy they went to high school with thirty years ago.”

  “Like I said, this should be easy.” I smiled.

  My relationship with the FBI was still a tenuous one. I hadn’t talked to Wharton or any of the other agents from the task force since the FBI leak that scooped me on my own story. I dealt directly with Manning now. But, once they found out I was going to Eckersville on this new lead, they assigned Manning to accompany me. Even though he was still dubious about my theory on this.

  I’d talked to Janet on the phone about what I was doing with Manning before I left. She told me for like the zillionth time I was making a bad decision by mixing my personal and professional lives.

  “This has disaster written all over it,” she said. “It’s like taking a loaded gun along with you. Sooner or later, that gun is going to go off.”

  “This is all professional, Janet. He’s the FBI agent. I’m the journalist. That’s all there is to it. We respect each other’s boundaries.”

  Janet snorted loudly into the phone. “You’ve got this new guy, Gary Weddle. The media consultant at your station. It sounds like you have a chance for a healthy relationship with him. You like Weddle, right?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “And Scott Manning is married. He’s not going to leave his wife for you. Even you must realize that. He had a chance to leave her a year ago, and he chose his marriage over you. Married guys who go back to their wives once do it again and again. You’re taking a chance on screwing up a healthy relationship by not walking away from an unhealthy one, Clare.”

  “I know what I’m doing.”

  “Well, that would be a first.”

  “Cute.”

  “At least make sure you stay in different hotels while you’re there.”

  “We’re booked at the same hotel.”

  “Jeez …”

  “Two different rooms, Janet. There are walls between the rooms, too. That way we can’t roll out of bed into each other’s arms or anything, if that’s what you’re worried about. The walls are pretty thick, too, I imagine. I mean, I’d have to use a sledgehammer to knock them down and get at Manning in the middle of the night.”

  “The Walls of Jeri
cho,” Janet muttered.

  “What?”

  “The Walls of Jericho. From the old movie with Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert. It Happened One Night. He’s a reporter and she’s a runaway heiress. They have to hide out in a hotel together, so they put a blanket up between them at night. The Walls of Jericho, Colbert called it. By the end of the movie, the Walls of Jericho have come down and they are together.”

  “There aren’t any walls coming down in my hotel,” I told her.

  I thought about that now as I looked over at Manning in the seat next to me on the plane. It had been a long night for him, getting everything organized with the FBI and planning the trip to Indiana with me. Even though it was only a two-hour flight, he was fast asleep. Watching him with his eyes closed like that made me remember the last time I’d seen him sleeping. It was a year ago when we’d had sex in my apartment. This time was different though. Just like I’d tried to convince Janet. Now I had to also convince myself of that for sure, too.

  I tried to keep my mind on the story, not on Scott Manning. I’d brought along a printout of names and possible locations/contact information for members of Eckersville High School in 1990 that we’d culled from yearbooks and other sources before leaving New York. I pored through them now.

  I was still doing that when Manning woke up and we landed at the Indianapolis International Airport.

  Chief Parkman had already organized his force at the Eckersville Police Station to work with the FBI on this when we got there. He said that he had nine full-time officers, plus a half dozen or so support personnel like secretaries and phone answerers. He said they could all be used for this, unless there was some breaking crime they needed to respond to. Since there wasn’t a whole lot of breaking crime in Eckersville, I figured we had them working with us for the duration.