Strangled - Brian McGrory [111]
I didn’t trust the sitting senior senator from Massachusetts, who built his career on his success in “solving” the Strangler case so long ago. I didn’t trust the current police commissioner for the same reason.
I didn’t trust the people I usually trust, and that may have hurt the most. I didn’t trust women, mostly in the form of Maggie Kane, who walked out on a marriage before it ever began. Of course, I was about to do the same, but that somehow seems beside the point.
I didn’t trust Peter Martin and publisher Justine Steele to do the right thing — not after they were browbeaten by city officials into not running the Phantom Fiend’s written assertion that the new strangler was the same as the old strangler.
I didn’t trust Vinny Mongillo. I didn’t think I’d ever say those words, except maybe in regard to leaving him alone with some really expensive food. But why on God’s good earth had he not told me that his mother was a strangling victim all those years ago?
And I wasn’t so sure I trusted myself anymore. The great Edgar Sullivan was dead because of me. So was some guy on the Public Garden who I never even knew. And here I was, ambling along, herking and jerking my way through a story that had no clear end. Was the Boston Strangler ultimately planning on confessing to me? Did he intend to kill another ten women, bringing his total this time around to what it had been before? How was this thing going to be resolved, and what role could I play in hastening a resolution?
And I certainly didn’t trust that anything good was about to happen, not as I listened on my cell phone to the aforementioned Peter Martin explain to me that the Phantom Fiend had reached out to me again in his most foreboding note yet, this one in the form of an e-mail to my Boston Record account. In the hours after Edgar’s death, Martin was wise enough to hire a security consultant, which had people monitoring my e-mail account, my U.S. mail, my house, and the newsroom. Thank God I didn’t live a life of secret fetishes, constantly communicating online with big-breasted blond amputees, because I would suddenly have a lot of explaining to do.
That consultant, in turn, read the e-mail and forwarded it on to Martin, who, in turn, read it to me, and it went exactly like this: “Mr. Flynn, you didn’t honor the one, simple request I made of you, to publish my words in the way I asked you to. I thought you were better than this. For that, there will be swift and severe consequences. People will suffer for your gutlessness. You will suffer with them. You may personally pick up a package at six o’clock tonight at the corner of Winter Street and Winter Place. The Phantom Fiend.”
I swallowed hard as I listened to every dreadful word. The Phantom didn’t seem to be a killer prone to hyperbole — i.e., see the word killer. Once he’s willing to kill beautiful young women, there’s not a whole lot that’s really worth exaggerating about. And now he was informing me that I, along with some nameless people, presumably other young women, would suffer from my gutlessness. I was half tempted to buy an advertisement in my cowardly little paper to let him know that I desperately wanted to run his words exactly in the way he had written them. Gutless my ass.
I said to Martin, “This doesn’t bode well on pretty much any level.” It was really all I had to say. There was no “I told you so” necessary. It wouldn’t get me anywhere different than I already was, and I knew that immediately.
Martin was so upset that his voice was on the brink of quavering when he said, “Maybe it’s not really him. Maybe this is the other side of the equation, the side that wants to see you dead.”
I replied, “That doesn’t add up.” I didn’t really intend