Strangled - Brian McGrory [20]
He ignored that as well. When Peter Martin gets something in his mind, he’s not to be sidetracked. He asked, though not really in the form of a question, “Can you get here in an hour. We need an early jump on the day.”
Early jump? There were farmers in Nebraska who would roll back over at that hour. But there wasn’t any real reason for me to reply, so I simply hung up the phone.
I lay in bed thinking the same basic questions as I had a few hours earlier when I went to sleep. Who tried to kill me? Was it the same person who sent me Jill Dawson’s driver’s license? Did the killer have a change of heart and now want me dead? What was with that glare that I seemed to get from Detective Mac Foley at the end of the night, and why was he pointing me out to another cop? This may have been the most intriguing question, because it begged another: Did some cops follow me from the banquet and down to the river? And yet another: Why the hell would police investigators want me dead?
My brain was spinning in more ways than one as I pushed back the covers and struggled to my feet. I lived in a condominium on the Boston waterfront, and had a view of the harbor and ocean beyond, but I don’t recall ever having seen a sunrise quite like this one, mostly because I don’t recall ever actually seeing a sunrise here. In the distance, across a black expanse of nothingness, was the faint light of morning that quietly announced the start of a new day, one that would undoubtedly be an adventurous, perhaps dangerous, but not necessarily enlightening one.
I showered. I downed a few handfuls of dry cereal — Honey Smacks, to be precise, formerly known as Sugar Smacks before we the people became like we did about what we eat and feed our kids. I thought, of course, about how I should have been waking up in Beverly Hills to a glorious room-service breakfast with my beautiful new wife, getting ready for a week in paradise. Instead, I snapped up the cordless phone on my kitchen counter amid a funereal silence that fit my mood, if not my life, the only occasional sound the wind knocking up against the windows. I didn’t imagine it was a warm wind, either. Truth is, I didn’t imagine I’d ever be warm again. I tapped out the number to the hotel that we were supposed to be staying at in Hawaii, trying to think of a dignified way to cancel the Honeymoon Package. I really couldn’t come up with one, though it didn’t matter. The manager I needed to speak to wasn’t around.
Well, this was certainly a nice way to start the day. I checked my voice mails. There was nothing good — meaning, specifically, nothing from Maggie Kane.
So at six-ten on a March morning, I was off, the world cold in so many ways. There was somebody out there who was going to be very disappointed that I was still alive today. The key for me was to make sure I was still alive tomorrow.
That’s when I saw it on the floor of my entryway, like someone had gained access to my building and slipped it under my door. It was a manila envelope much like the one that was delivered to my desk by the Record’s security director, Edgar, the morning before — oversized, with my name printed on it in a blocky typeface. I had my overcoat on by now, over a suit coat, and I stood by the door and held the envelope in my hand for a long moment. I could already feel something of a more substantial weight inside than a sheet of paper. I didn’t like where this was going.
I carefully opened it from the top, trying to slice it as cleanly as possible in case any part of the envelope held evidence that I couldn’t see. I carefully pulled out a single sheet of folded paper. I opened it and read the note in the familiar typeface. “Back again,” it said. “More women will die.” On a separate line, the typed signature, “The Phantom Fiend.”
I stared at the words until the letters blurred and I was looking at nothing but the page they were written on. Whoever left this for me had gained access to the building, knew which apartment I lived in, and slipped it under