Strangled - Brian McGrory [43]
When I was about thirty yards from the park gates, I saw a cab roll to a stop at the entrance. The door flung open and a well dressed young man — I say well dressed and young because he looked similar to me — stepped out and strode purposefully inside the park in the direction of the September 11 memorial. Across the wrought-iron fence and through the defoliated trees that separated the Public Garden from Arlington Street, I could see the man sit on one of the stone benches facing a memorial wall etched with the names of all the victims. I slowed down, curious. He slouched with his two hands folded under his chin. He then hung his head low, his hands holding the back of his neck in what I guessed was sad contemplation.
I kept walking toward the gates of the Public Garden, but slower now. I didn’t know if this was the man I was supposed to meet. If it was, I was shocked at his age, which, like I said, was close to mine. I had anticipated someone much older, from the voice on the phone and the fact that the original Boston stranglings had occurred forty-plus years before. More likely, the guy was simply a visitor to the memorial, and a visitor who looked like he wanted some time alone.
It was when I was walking through the grand front gates, toward the memorial, that I heard what could have been a car backfiring, or someone setting off firecrackers, but I knew instantly to my core that it was something else entirely: gunshots. Reflexively, I ran my hands down my arms and torso to see if I had been the target. I felt nothing liquid, which was good. I also didn’t feel any pain, which was better. The sound had come from the area of the memorial, so I instinctively hunched low along the evergreen bushes and trotted along the cement path toward the man I had seen earlier.
I had run maybe twenty yards when, without warning, a figure in black blasted from one of the bushes and slammed directly into my face and chest with such ferocious force that we were both knocked to the ground. My head bounced on the pavement, causing me to see the clichéd stars of comic-book fame. More to the point, I also saw a handgun clank on the ground a few feet from my left arm. Without thinking, which is probably why I did it, I lunged for it, but the guy who knocked me over had already scrambled to his feet and dove on the weapon just ahead of me. He then leapt back up and sprinted toward the park entrance. I climbed unsteadily to my feet and set off in an uncertain pursuit.
I had staggered but a dozen or so steps when I saw the guy fling open the back door of an awaiting van along the curb of Arlington Street. I saw the van peel away. I heard a woman wailing in the distance, “He’s bleeding to death. Someone call for help. He’s dying.”
The next day’s paper would identify the victim as Joshua Carpenter, the husband of a flight attendant who was killed in the September 11, 2001, attack. His family would be quoted saying that, without the actual body of his wife, without a gravestone to mark it, he visited the memorial every morning to mourn her. Police would say that he was the victim of a brazen daylight robbery, and that uniformed officers and plainclothes detectives were calling in all their informants and scouring the city’s most drug-addled sections for any tips on the killers.
I knew it wasn’t a robbery. I knew this poor man wasn’t the intended victim. And I knew as well that the cops would never find the killer.
But that’s all I knew, and that was a huge problem.
13
My plane bounced down at McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas, as if the pilot was in as big a rush to get to the tables as everyone else. Everyone but me, that is. I had come here