Strangled - Brian McGrory [35]
“Which camp were you in?” I asked.
Before he could answer, my cell phone vibrated in my coat pocket. Normally, I wouldn’t talk on the phone in this dining room. It just didn’t seem right. But given my current circumstances, I apologized to Sweeney and quietly answered the call, which was from Peter Martin.
I hadn’t even offered so much as a hello when Martin said, “Bad news. Justine’s made up her mind. She wants that story held for at least one day, maybe two. I think the acting mayor got to her again and pleaded for more time. I tried like hell.”
I was too stunned to argue and too angry to try. So I said, “Big mistake. We’ll talk in the morning. Hopefully, we’re not playing catch-up when someone else reports a serial killer.”
Martin said, “I know. Believe me, I know. I’ll see you here early.” I looked at my watch — 10:40 p.m.— and knew that Martin was still in the Record newsroom. He had probably been there, no exaggeration, since his call to me at about five in the morning, and didn’t have so much as an exclusive story to show for it in the following day’s paper. Sometimes the news business really sucks.
I hung up. Sweeney said to me, “Good God, son, it looks like the gypsies just ran off with your dog and your baseball glove. What’s going on with you?”
I told him. I told him about the notes from someone identifying themselves as the Phantom Fiend. I told him about the visit to Park Drive that morning, seeing the strangled young woman sitting in a chair, a macabre prop in some madman’s game. I told him about the incident on the river the night before, the anger in the police commissioner’s voice that morning, the fact that Mac Foley was proving to be anything but helpful.
He nodded all the way through, until finally I asked him, “So which camp were you in, Hank?”
“Doesn’t matter who I was with,” he said in that raspy voice. “I was a nothing back then, as junior as an April bud on a New England tree. But if I were you…”
He stopped here, took his first sip of port, gave an approving sigh — suddenly, everyone’s a vino critic — and continued. “If I were you, I would track down Detective Walters, a man who I respected very much — and still do. I would ask him why he believes DeSalvo wasn’t the Boston Strangler. I think you might find what he has to say to be of significant interest.”
He sipped his port again. I said, “I will. I absolutely will. But regardless of what he has to say, how can you ever prove a negative? How can you prove that a dead man wasn’t the killer that everyone believed him to be?”
Hank smiled, his smile turning into a soft, knowing laugh. “That’s easy, son. Easy. Forensics. Science.”
I tapped the table a couple of times, trying to get my mind around what he meant. These murders occurred some forty years ago, back when they used fingerprints, not sophisticated DNA testing, to match murderers to crime scenes and prove guilt beyond any reasonable statistical doubt. Hank saw the look on my face, one of confusion, and continued.
“The killer left his semen — his DNA — at the crime scenes. I’m betting it was pretty well preserved.”
I replied, skeptically, “Okay, but DeSalvo’s dead and buried. Even if you could find those DNA samples, how would you match them to his?”
Hank drained his port and said, “That should be the easiest part of all. The knife.”
He let that linger there for effect before adding, “The knife that was used to kill Albert DeSalvo has his blood — his DNA — all over it. The question everyone’s been wondering for a whole lot of years is, where is it? It was left beside his body by whoever killed him in jail. Evidence in a murder case isn’t supposed to disappear, but my understanding is, this evidence did.”
Another pause, to even greater effect. Say what you will about Hank Sweeney. Call him dramatic. Call him melodramatic. But the guy knows how to hook an audience, which in this case was me.
“Find the knife,” he told me. “Find the knife and you’re on your way to answering the most enduring