Strangled - Brian McGrory [159]
Interesting answer, though all his answers are usually pretty interesting. I sat up and looked over at him sprawled topless in his chair, clad in a pair of flowered surfer shorts, slathered in baby oil, his skin as dark as the inside of that post office ever was, his hand wrapped around a cell phone that I’m not even sure worked this far away from home.
“Need to do what?” I asked.
He looked at me. Even his cocoa-colored eyes seemed to have darkened in the sun.
“You know — whatever. Win a Pulitzer. Start a family. Achieve some sense of inner peace.”
I was about to say something, though what, I’m not really sure, when he cut in, “That’s the problem with you, Jack. You almost had what you always wanted, and then it got taken away. Now you’re too hesitant to do something that’s not planned down to the most minute details. You’re too protective — of yourself. Maybe it’s just that you’re afraid.”
For this I got woken from a quiet reverie involving marine mammals and cockapoos. Or maybe that’s cockatoos.
“Treat life like a story,” he said. “Let it unfold. Kick your feet up and go along for the ride. Manipulate it where you can, enjoy the parts that you can’t.”
A nice thought, even if I wasn’t entirely sure what he meant.
I slammed the Paul Vasco story out of the park that night. As I sped back to the Record, I dispatched Mongillo and Hank Sweeney to Jennifer Cooper’s apartment and they found exactly what I expected, which was her body, dead about a day.
I jumped on the phone and called the Boston Police Department’s holding cell and had them put Detective Mac Foley on the line. I told him what I had, which was an intercepted letter from Paul Vasco to him. I told him what we found, which was a dead woman highlighted in the mailing. And then I told him what I believed, which was that Paul Vasco was sending him the driver’s licenses and other clues leading him to recently strangled women, just as the Boston Strangler had done with Bob Walters some forty years before.
And just like four decades previous, higher-ups in the department wanted to keep the correspondence under wraps. So Foley in turn forwarded them on to me, knowing they would generate enormous publicity and immense public pressure around the case, just at the time that the buffoonish commissioner was running for mayor.
In what may well be the most extraordinary on-the-record interview of my career, Mac Foley admitted to all this and more. He said he was so frustrated with the lack of publicity that he devised that mini-manifesto, and that when the Record didn’t immediately publish it, he stole Elizabeth Riggs’s driver’s license and sent me the note that essentially said “Or else.” He never intended to kill her. That’s what he said, anyway. I guess I believe him, but maybe not.
Foley was being hailed as a hero throughout BPD, a whistle-blower of the highest order. Soon enough, though, he’d be an indicted one. Word is that the Suffolk County District Attorney is looking at charges of evidence tampering, obstruction of justice, and interfering with an investigation. With a good lawyer, my bet is that he can keep himself out of jail.
The entire journalism world was chasing us the next day, and just when they thought they’d caught up, we came out the day after that with the results of DNA testing from Mongillo’s long-hidden knife. The irrefutable findings: Albert DeSalvo was not the Boston Strangler. More bedlam, like it couldn’t get any worse, until the morning after that when we carried the story, based on the cigarette butt that we had pulled from that dismal little room, that Paul Vasco’s DNA was tied to at least five of the murders from the early 1960s.
Hal Harrison ended his mayoral campaign that very day, not with a bang but with a press release. He needed to spend more time with his family, he said. I didn’t quite get that, since he was divorced and his kids were off in college. What was he going to do, attend keg parties with them? I never had the heart to ask.
Of course, Mongillo, Sweeney, and I committed at least one felony,