Strangled - Brian McGrory [141]
I shared with them my suspicions about Mac Foley — the fact he knew Lauren Hutchens’s apartment number, his history of being a bitter rival of Commissioner Hal Harrison, his presence around Elizabeth Riggs on the morning she lost her license and might have been slated for murder. I told them of my morning meeting with Harrison and his unveiled threats. I told them of my later meeting with DeSalvo’s lawyer, H. Thomas Gordon, and explained how pretty much the only thing I got from him was frustrated.
I was just finishing up when Barbara, the paper’s longtime newsroom receptionist, flung the glass door open to Martin’s office and said, “You’re going to want to turn on the television.”
So Martin did, to CNN, where a rather comely reporter — a female, by the way — was standing outside Boston Police headquarters with a microphone in her perfectly manicured hand. Across the top of the screen, the slogan “The Strangler Returns” was written in bright red. On the bottom, “Breaking News” flashed in orange.
“Again, ladies and gentlemen, my Boston Police sources are telling me that Detective Mac Foley was taken into custody within the last half hour as what a high-level police official describes as, and I’m quoting him here, ‘a person of interest’ in the current Strangler investigation. Foley was one of the detectives on both this case and the strangulations from over forty years ago.
“Those same sources tell me that evidence confiscated from Foley’s house has been tied to what has been described to me as a ‘potential victim.’ He has been suspended with pay by Commissioner Hal Harrison, forced to turn over his gun, and is now being questioned by an FBI interrogator who was brought in specifically to handle this aspect of the case.
“We’ll update you as we know it. But one more time, a potentially major and blockbuster break this afternoon in the case of the current Boston stranglings. Back to you, Gray.”
The screen quickly flashed to a commercial for adult diapers, which I thought Peter Martin and Justine Steele might need at the moment. Me, I was too stunned to speak or even think, though I did wonder what kind of parents name their kid Gray.
As far as the story went, part of me felt vindicated, that my suspicions had panned out, that the cops had apparently found something in Foley’s house tying him to Elizabeth Riggs. Part of me was quietly elated that the case appeared to have been cracked, that the letters with the driver’s licenses of recent victims would stop. Yet another part of me, the one with those little shards of information knocking around my brain, felt uneasy about it all, like there was something else at play here. But the bigger part of me, maybe an embarrassing part of me, was fuming that I had just watched the whimpering end to this enormous story on a national cable network, rather than having broken it myself on the pages of my Boston Record. I got the letters. I saw the victims. I did the investigative work. I felt the guilt. This was my story, from beginning to its presumed end, and I didn’t want to see any part of it broken on TV.
Sitting there, my aggravation turned to controlled fury. I was the one who developed the intuitive suspicions about Mac Foley. I passed them along to Hal Harrison. And then he burnt me to a crisp, leaking to CNN what should have been mine. If there’s one thing a newspaper reporter hates most, and trust me, there are a lot of things a newspaper reporter hates a lot, it’s watching a story that he or she has owned get advanced by some blow-dried, over-powdered lightweight on cable TV.
Martin looked at me and said in an unusually high-pitched voice, “Jack?”
Before I could answer, my ass started vibrating, not out of anger, but from the phone call that I seemed to have been receiving. I glanced at the cell and saw it was a 702 number, so I said disgustedly, “Let me just take this first.”
I gave it my usual “Flynn here.” A woman’s voice said, “Jack, it’s Deirdre Hayes. I never got to thank you for that money you left on the counter. So, well,