Strangled - Brian McGrory [148]
By now I was jotting notes down. Mongillo was still spewing into his phone, alternately laughing and uttering exclamations like “C’mon, zip it back up.” At another point, his tone got deadly serious and he said to whoever it was on the other end of the line, “This one’s personal to me. My mother was one of the victims all those years ago.”
I thanked Harrison, hung up the phone, and stared out the front windshield through the raw March night at the hulking house that held Paul Vasco, who suddenly didn’t seem all that relevant to my story.
Or did he. Something just kept telling me he was. Maybe it was the photographs of the victims on Vasco’s wall. Maybe it was that satanic smile of his when he talked about the crimes. Maybe it was the look on Foley’s face, one of desperation, but perhaps one of honor as well.
Before you destroy my life, before you ruin what’s left of my career, before you destroy my wife, my daughter, my whole reputation, please put it to Paul Vasco.
Mongillo hung up the phone.
“You get what I get?” I asked.
“The license?”
I nodded and asked, “A good source?”
Now he nodded.
I snapped open the cell phone and dialed Peter Martin, who answered, as always, on the first ring. I relayed the information. I read him a quote that was to be attributed to a law enforcement official involved in the investigation. His tone was nearly giddy as he hung up to make the changes for the paper’s next edition.
Mongillo nodded toward the darkened house that loomed over our car. “Still worthwhile?” he asked.
“Something tells me it is,” I said. We both opened the doors at the same time.
Just like on our visit two days before, the front door was unlocked, and the downstairs lobby, such as it is, was unguarded.
Vinny and I made our way up the dark staircase and walked along the decrepit wooden floors on the second story until we arrived simultaneously in front of Paul Vasco’s door. I reached out and softly knocked.
Inside, I heard movement, and judging from the slight squint he gave, so did Mongillo, but no one answered the door. So I knocked again, this time more firmly. More noise, like a muffled shuffling, but still Vasco didn’t come to the door.
I knocked a third time, a firm rap now, which was met by utter silence. Mongillo put his face against the door and called out, “Paul, it’s Vinny Mongillo and Jack Flynn. Can you let us in for a minute?”
Nothing. So I tried the knob. It was open. I mean, think about that for a moment. The door was open — in a halfway house filled with supposedly reforming criminals. Shocked doesn’t begin to describe how I felt. Neither does pleased.
I looked at Mongillo; he held up a single fat finger, and I’m pretty sure we were both thinking the same thing. If we walked into this room, we would at that point be trespassing, and Paul Vasco, a convicted killer with a confessed lust for the act of murder, could rightfully gun us down in our woeful tracks. A jury would not only acquit him, it’d probably award him damages for the pain and suffering of having a couple of jerk reporters mucking around in his life.
I shut my eyes for a second, furiously trying to figure out a course of action. Vinny motioned for me to slowly push open the door, which I did, a crack, and Vinny called out, “Paul, it’s Jack and Vinny. We need to come in for a second. Is that all right?”
No sounds, no movement, no answer.
So I edged the door open another few inches. Mongillo looked at me and I motioned him aside. I stepped through the narrow opening, my arm first, figuring if that was shot off, I still had another. Then a leg. Same theory.
“Paul, it’s Jack Flynn. I really need to see you.”
And then my face. One hard bulb illuminated the room, and what I saw was absolutely no one. That is, until I saw the shoe resting on its side, half under the bed — a workboot, actually, with dried mud caked on the treads of its soles.
It’s funny how the mind works in a crisis, or at least under pressure. It