Strangled - Brian McGrory [22]
Martin pointed to the chair to his right, in an apparent invitation, though maybe it was a command. I don’t know. As I sat, he said to me, “I woke up with a jolt last night. I had this thought that you may not be the only reporter in town that the Phantom Fiend is corresponding with. And if you’re not, someone else might get this story into print before us.”
He had a point, as he often does, even if it seemed needless to make it at 6:30 a.m. I was already becoming proprietary about the Phantom Fiend. Yes, he may have been a killer, but he was my killer, and I’d just as soon keep it that way.
Mongillo coughed hard. I thought I saw a piece of chewed doughnut land on the table in front of me, but didn’t want to inspect it too closely for fear that I was right. I asked Martin, “What makes you think that?”
“Wichita,” he replied. “The BTK serial killer back in the seventies and eighties. He sent a letter to the local paper that mistakenly got routed to the classified ad department. He was so frustrated that his name didn’t get into print that he started writing to TV reporters, radio reporters, the cops. Anyone with a fricking PO box. They lost control of the story. I don’t want that to happen here.”
I nodded. Mongillo tried to speak for the first time since I arrived, but his voice was choked by the doughnut that he was coughing up. He began coughing again.
I ignored him and pushed the envelope toward Martin. “We’ve heard from him again,” I said.
Martin’s eyes shone bright, the same look Mongillo tends to get when you place a nicely seasoned cut of prime rib before him. He tenderly — almost lovingly — fingered the envelope and pulled out the note and driver’s license inside. I worried for a moment about contaminating potential fingerprints, but then thought that surely this killer wasn’t moronic enough not to wear gloves.
Martin stared at them both in silence. Finally, he looked up and asked me, “Is Lauren Hutchens dead?”
I brought him up to date on my phone calls and concluded, “I don’t know.”
Meantime, Mongillo was hacking and wheezing and making various guttural noises that are rarely heard beyond the hog lots of Iowa. Finally, thankfully, he stood up and left the room. Martin never even gave him a look.
In Vinny’s absence, Martin asked, “Do we knock on her door or do we call the police?”
An excellent question, one that I had contemplated on my drive into work. The safe thing to do, the responsible thing to do, would have been to call Mac Foley and tell him I was holding the driver’s license of a young woman, courtesy of the same person who sent me Jill Dawson’s license. The one problem with that scenario was that once I made that call, I would effectively lose control over the story. Foley wasn’t of the mind to play much ball with the Record, not yet anyway.
But equally problematic was the question of how the paper would benefit if I knocked on Hutchens’s door. What could I possibly discover that might outweigh the possibility of somehow fouling valuable evidence?
“I think we have to call the police immediately,” I said.
At that moment, Mongillo walked back into the room, a tissue in his hand and his eyes rimmed with red from his coughing fit. He sat down dramatically, turned to me, and said, “Can I see those notes he sent you?”
I slid him the most recent one and pulled a photocopy of the first note from a notebook in front of me. Mongillo read them over in silence. He made a motion with his hand, and Martin handed him Lauren Hutchens’s license.
Finally, he looked up at me.
“You know who the Phantom Fiend is, right?”
I shook my head and replied, “I’ve been trying to find that out for twenty-four hours, but the library has nothing on him.”
Mongillo looked from me to Martin and back to me. “It’s the Boston Strangler.”
The Boston Strangler? My mind began racing like a Chin-coteague pony. The most famous serial killer in United States history — though Son of Sam might have an issue with that. He inspired fear, then books, then a major motion picture starring