Strangled - Brian McGrory [58]
17
I had twenty-eight voice mails on my cell phone when I dialed in from the rental car, and immediately assumed that twenty of them were from Peter Martin. Ends up I was wrong. Twenty-one of them were from Martin. By the fifteenth one, he was reduced to pleading: “Call me.” Voice mail sixteen: “Call me now.” Voice mail seventeen: “Fricking call me now.” Voice mail eighteen: “Fucking call me or you’re fired.”
Voice mails nineteen and after continue in that same general tone and theme.
I got five messages from other media outlets, including The New York Times and The Washington Post, wanting to interview me about my correspondence from the Phantom Fiend. There was a message from Boston Police Detective Mac Foley, sounding anything but happy with my reportage in that morning’s paper. The one remaining voice mail came from Vinny Mongillo, providing me a list of his favorite Vegas restaurants and offering — or was it threatening — to fly out and join me for what he described as “a little dinner and an evening of gaming.” Such is the adventurous life of an intrepid reporter on the road.
None of the messages, perceptive minds might note, were from anyone identifying themselves as the Phantom Fiend. For that matter, I was also lacking a voice mail from one Maggie Kane, who almost became Maggie Kane Flynn, though not really.
I was about thirty minutes from the Strip, not including traffic, so it wasn’t worth my while to go back to the hotel. Instead, I pulled off the road into the parking lot of a lush golf club named Dunes East, even though there wasn’t a dune within a hundred miles of the place, and called Martin back. He, of course, picked up the phone on the first ring and promptly explained that the city of Boston was unraveling at the seams.
Police, he said, held a press conference at Schroeder Plaza to say they were unconvinced that a serial killer was on the loose, and publicly complained that the Record had published its story before any of the correspondence could be — their word here — “authenticated.” I’m not really sure how you authenticate a note from an anonymous person, and I don’t think they knew either. But you can bet that the blow-dried reporters on the six o’clock newscasts wouldn’t be probing this particular point as they repeated the complaints verbatim. Also, you can bet that Jill Dawson and Lauren Hutchens wouldn’t have had any doubt about the existence of a serial killer, if they were still around to have doubt, which is once again the point.
Those aforementioned television reporters were chronicling a massive run on pepper spray and mace by women, as well as a surge in demand for area locksmiths, according to Martin. One particularly creative reporter even did a stand-up from the Animal Rescue League’s dog shelter, where she reported a sudden spike in dog adoptions by the city’s female population.
There weren’t any other new developments on the story, Martin said — no more calls to the Barry Bor Show that morning, no blog postings, no new deaths — at least none we knew about yet. Maybe the Phantom was all mine again. We can only hope, right?
Martin told me that Edgar Sullivan wanted to speak to me, but was in a meeting for the next twenty minutes and would call back. I briefed Martin about my Walters meeting and promised to be on an eastbound plane by nightfall.
I then called back a few of the print reporters who had left me messages earlier in the day. To each of them I explained off the record about the various notes but said I was forbidden from talking for attribution, which in a way was true; I had forbidden myself. The TV people I didn’t bother with, knowing full well they wouldn’t have bothered with me.
And I hung up. I checked the dashboard clock and it read 10:50 a.m. I figured it would be safe to return to the Walters’s house at about noon — safe meaning that the Abu Ghraib guard who doubled as his home health care worker would