Strangled - Brian McGrory [3]
Foley slowly stepped toward the door. He’d been to, what, five hundred murder scenes over his career? A thousand? He hated to admit it, but it was true: after all those years, there was a certain sameness about them. Not only were the neighborhoods usually the same, but so were the streets. The victims were almost always black, with criminal records and substance abuse problems. Witnesses were few and far between — at least for the cops. Occasionally, he’d get the random, unfortunate eleven-year-old gunned down in gang cross fire, or the young woman in a middle-class neighborhood killed by an enraged boyfriend or husband. But they were rare, which was good.
This one, he knew, would be unusual from the moment he heard the address.
“What’s her name?” Foley asked the sergeant.
The sergeant looked down at a small piece of lined paper that he pulled out of his shirt pocket. “Jill Dawson,” he replied.
Foley’s eyes widened. He stared at the sergeant for a long moment, about to say something, except he didn’t. Instead, he hurriedly opened the bedroom door, took one step, and abruptly stopped. He realized immediately that he wasn’t just looking at a crime scene, wasn’t just looking at a victim, but was also looking at his distant past.
His knees buckled slightly and he leaned quickly, reflexively, against the wall behind him, not even thinking that he might be smudging prints or compromising any other kinds of evidence.
His eyes, though, never left the corpse. She had been a young woman, pretty, with blond hair that had grown past her shoulders. She was naked from the waist down, with only a torn shirt and an unfastened bra on top, revealing her small breasts. She was propped up in her double bed on top of a white comforter, her back against the headboard, her head tilted to one side, her eyes wide open, and her legs splayed apart unnaturally, showing her pubic area. She was positioned so that when you walked into the door, she was staring straight back at you.
Foley took several long, uneasy breaths, steadied his legs, and walked toward the body. When he got closer to the bed, he saw what he had feared most. Around her neck was a ligature, a nylon stocking pulled tight, then tied into a swirling, garish bow under her chin. He saw blood in her left ear — a sure sign she had been strangled.
He’d never seen this woman before, but he’d seen the crime — too many times, forty years before, the Phantom Fiend who had come to be known as the Boston Strangler.
He pulled a pair of latex gloves from his suit pocket and walked from the side of her bed to the foot of it. There, he saw what he had thought he had noticed when he first walked into the room: an unsealed white envelope propped against her foot.
Just as he had about four decades ago, he stood bedside at a murder scene and opened an envelope. He pulled out a sheet of paper — heavy stock, not inexpensive, folded over once — and opened that up as well. With a chill, he read the crudely written words, “Happy New Year.” The letters were large and sloppy, each one of them of different size. Right beneath that, the killer had written, “Picking up where I left off…”
Foley folded up the note, placed it back in the envelope, and rested the envelope against the woman’s foot. He let his eyes roam over her body, and as he did, he felt the past crashing against the present, clouding the future — his past, his future, the commissioner’s past, the commissioner’s future, his city’s past, the city’s future. Maybe he should have felt vindicated in some odd way, but anything that had happened, anything that was about to happen, was too late to help him.
He walked toward the door and saw the uniformed sergeant still standing in the hallway, leaning against a wall.
A thought suddenly dawned on him.
“What’s the address here again?” he asked the sergeant. He knew the answer already, but he had to hear it said out loud.
“One forty-six Charles Street,” the sergeant replied.
The words were like pinpricks in his brain. The last victim of the Boston Strangler, or at least what