Strangled - Brian McGrory [143]
And so it went for seven more letters, all of them addressed to Detective Walters, all of them signed by the Phantom Fiend, most of them alerting him to the presence of a body that had yet to be discovered, a couple apologizing that they had been found by someone else.
My head, for every obvious reason, was spinning or swimming or whatever heads do when they can barely process the staggering, earth-shaking information flowing into them. How did the news media not know about these letters? Why did police keep them quiet? Were there handwriting samples taken? Fingerprints? Anything to tie these letters to Albert DeSalvo?
I immediately thought of Bob Walters sprawled across his bed when I visited him the week before. In this case, we held something back that was pretty big. That’s what he’d said, and I never probed him on it. If I had, I probably would have found out about these notes days before.
All of which brought me back to H. Gordon Thomas’s line earlier that day. You want to get it in writing, young man. That’s the best advice I can give you.
This, I assume, is what he meant. Or was it?
I did a quick calculation, and these notes seemed to further open the possibility that Detective Mac Foley could have sent the current notes to me, because he would have been in a position to know about the old ones. Or maybe he had sent the old ones as well, which brought me back to that old firebug theory of the arsonist who extinguishes his own work.
Or it could mean that Paul Vasco sent the notes then, and was sending them now. Or that the Strangler of old, if it wasn’t Vasco, is the Strangler of new.
I turned to Deirdre, who was watching me partake in these mental calisthenics and gymnastics, and I said, “I can’t thank you enough.”
“What’s it mean?” she asked.
“I have no idea, but damned if I’m not about to find out.” Then I added, “Come on upstairs for a moment. We owe you a courier fee for your services.”
Peter Martin was about to pay through the nose.
39
I was staring at a blank computer screen, which is something that no writer, never mind a reporter on a deadline, likes to do, when Peter Martin parked himself in a chair at a neighboring desk and wheeled it toward mine.
Problem was, he wheeled it directly over Huck’s tail, unpleasantly rousing him from a deep slumber. Huck bolted up in shock. Martin scrambled from the chair and leapt over my desk to escape what he believed would be the unmerciful wrath of a ferocious animal, and I sat there momentarily contemplating what my life would have been like if I’d taken the LSATs.
“You’ve got to get that thing in a cage,” Martin said.
“He’s confined in the same cage that we all are,” I replied. I thought that was pretty profound. Martin eyed me like I had lost my mind.
Rather than respond, he said, “Every network, every newspaper, every blogger, every radio station, every mainstream website is going whole hog on the cop-as-murderer saga. Newsweek put out a story on its website quoting victims’ families from the sixties saying they always thought Mac Foley was an odd guy. FOX News is reporting that the White House is preparing an invitation to Hal Harrison for dinner with the president, in hopes of luring him into the Republican Party. CBS Radio is quoting defense lawyers all over Boston describing the shoddy investigative methods Foley used to employ in convicting other murderers. ‘Other murderers.’ They actually used that term, like Foley was already convicted.”
I shook my head. I’m the one who started all this in a typical negotiating session earlier that morning with the commissioner of the Boston Police. And here I was, just a few hours later, already sucking the fumes of other news outlets’ progress, as if I had suddenly become irrelevant to the entire tale. I didn’t like it for that reason. I liked it even less