Strangled - Brian McGrory [147]
40
We were rounding the corner onto Bulham Avenue in the Charlestown section of Boston, Vinny and I, when the Muzak I was listening to on my cell phone abruptly clicked off and my ear was suddenly filled with the familiar voice of Boston Police Commissioner Hal Harrison.
“Sorry to keep you on hold, Jack,” he said, though I doubt he really was. “It’s bedlam over here. That was a good tip you gave me on Mac Foley. That thing has paid off in spades.”
Beside me, in the passenger seat of my Honda, Vinny Mongillo was barking into his cell phone at another police official, “You’ve got to be shoving the private parts of a donkey right in my coffee-colored eyes. You’re sure you have it locked down? You’re telling me I can go into print and feel good about this?”
I glanced over at him, unable to get his unfortunate imagery out of my head. I wheeled the car up to the curb in front of Paul Vasco’s halfway house. It was 10:00 p.m. Huck was sound asleep in the back.
“Yeah,” I said to Harrison. “I’ve been watching these spades all over CNN and FOX News. You capitalized on my tip, and then spoon-fed it to everyone else in the world but me.”
Harrison replied, “Jack, I would have loved to have held that for you. But Christ almighty, this place is swarmed by press. I’ve got cops leaking left and right. There was no way —”
I cut him off and said, “I need something else, something fresh, something they don’t have. You owe me.”
It was deadline — after deadline, actually — for the first editions of the next day’s Record, and though I had many fat paragraphs of exclusive information in the story, I wanted to advance the investigation with something that would force the networks to give chase. In this business, you never settle for what you have, because there’s always something else to get. And if you don’t get it, someone else will.
Harrison said, “Let me talk on background for a moment, as a law enforcement source.”
I liked the direction this was headed. “Go ahead,” I said.
“My guys are in the process of executing a search warrant at Mac Foley’s house. They’re still over there. But my lieutenant at the scene just called to say they’ve already found something of extreme interest. Again, not from me. You have to protect me. But I want you to have this.”
He paused. I said nothing. He continued, “They found Kimberly May’s driver’s license in one of his dresser drawers.”
Kimberly May being the third victim, the one identified via the video taken by her killer in her apartment.
I reflexively drew a deep breath, and in Harrison’s brief, intentional, and dramatic silence, I quickly tried to sort through my feelings. First, I was thrilled to be in possession of this nugget, which could probably take over the lede of my story. This essentially and truly implicated one of the most respected homicide detectives in Boston, all based on my initial tip.
The second emotion I felt was relief, that maybe, really, truly, the Phantom Fiend was caught and would spend the rest of his life behind bars, never to torment my city, or me, for that matter, ever again.
The third emotion, and this is where the reporter side of me rears its occasionally ugly but often pragmatic head, was doubt. I just didn’t, couldn’t, maybe wouldn’t believe that Mac Foley was involved in the murders of three young women now, and perhaps eleven victims from forty years before. It wasn’t that I liked him so much. It wasn’t even that I knew him. I just had this nagging sense that there was something — or maybe someone — else involved.
The facts, of course, belied my intuition. Mac Foley with Elizabeth Riggs’s purse. Mac Foley with knowledge of Lauren Hutchens’s apartment number. Now Mac Foley with Kimberly May’s license. Much as I was hesitant to believe it, the raw details made for an excellent newspaper story.
“Right now, we’re charging him with interfering with an investigation,” Harrison began anew. “That gives us the ability to hold him. We’ll seek high bail from a judge, get a DNA sample, and compare that with possible samples from the crime scenes.