Strangled - Brian McGrory [120]
Another woman answered the phone and informed me that this call was being recorded. I told her that someone in her city might be in trouble. She asked, skeptically, what I meant. Good question. I told her I had received an ominous threat. She asked the address. I gave it to her. Then I gave her my number.
That call ended, I looked at Hank and said, “Where are we headed?”
“The newsroom. It’s where you do your best thinking.” And then he added, “You need to call Boston PD.”
I did. He was right. But something was holding me back, that something known as distrust. Still, his first simple answer — “the newsroom” — jarred something in my head, and I pulled my phone open again, dialed 411, and asked for the number for The New York Times.
After an infuriating five-minute session with the newspaper’s automatic telephone system, a real live human being finally picked up a phone, announcing in a bored voice, “National Desk.” It was now 1:45 a.m. I suspected they were just past deadline for their final edition.
I said, “This is Jack Flynn. I’m a reporter for the Boston Record. Is the national editor on duty around?”
“You’re talking to him.” No name, no nothing. His voice remained every bit as bored and almost painstakingly unimpressed by the announcement of my identity. I mean, I assumed everyone at The Times knew who I was, dating back to that botched presidential assassination deal a few years back when I kicked the shit out of them for a month straight on the biggest story in the world. And here I was at the heart of another story that was increasingly national in scope.
I said, “Sir, this is something of a life-and-death emergency. I’m the Record’s reporter on the Phantom Fiend/Boston Strangler story. I desperately need to contact your San Francisco reporter, Elizabeth Riggs, but she’s not answering her home or cell phone number. Do you know if she’s on the road? Have you talked to her recently?”
“Tell me your name again.”
Good Christ. Your name would have to be Bartleby Hornsby III to have any impact on these clowns, and then the most he’d probably ask is if I had a brother who went to Deerfield or Exeter.
“Jack Flynn,” I said, gritting my teeth.
Hank was steering through the Theater District now, such as it is in Boston, heading toward the highway for the short jaunt to the Record.
“And why do you need her?” Bored as ever, the words coming out of his mouth like marshmallows.
I said, “She may be in grave danger. Look, I’m a Record reporter. I’m covering this story. If it helps at all, The Times has twice offered me a job.”
Working in the company cafeteria.
I fell silent. I could hear him pecking around a keyboard, presumably with his fingers. And then he said, sleepily, “Our file shows she’s in Boston on assignment.”
My heart fell even further, if that’s possible, and I didn’t think it was. One more bit of bad news and the thing would be beating in the soles of my feet — or not beating at all.
I said, “When did she get here and where is she staying?”
More silence, though I could again hear the pecking in the near background.
He cleared his throat. “Tell me your name again,” he said.
I did. Then he said, “The Fairmont Copley Plaza hotel. I have her down in Room 533. She was supposed to have arrived yesterday.”
I hung up without saying good-bye, and all but screamed at Hank to point the car toward Copley Square, which he did.
On the way crosstown, on the virtually empty streets, I punched out 411 again and asked for the hotel number. It rang through and a man in an unfamiliar accent — probably best known as hotelier — answered the phone. When I asked for Elizabeth Riggs’s room, he hesitated for what felt like forever, asked me to spell it, put me on hold, and then got back on the line.
“I’ll put you right through, sir,” he said. And he did.
The phone rang once, twice, three times, then four, before it kicked over to an automated voice system with a generic woman’s voice.
“Elizabeth, Jack. Call me,