Strangled - Brian McGrory [63]
He didn’t, though, bother putting me on hold. Instead I heard the receiver clank on what sounded like a metal desktop. Then I heard him yell, “Hey, Mac, the asshole is on line one.”
I could vaguely hear a distant voice reply, “Which asshole?”
“The big one.”
The phone clicked and another voice came on and announced, “Foley here.”
“Jack Flynn calling.”
“Jack,” he said, his tone surprisingly upbeat, “you outdid yourself. I thought I’d seen a lot of bad, sleazy reporting in my fortysomething years on the job here, but in today’s fish wrap, you turned sleaziness into an art form.”
I said, “Thank you. God knows we try.”
Actually, that’s not really what I said, though I might have, if he had given me a chance, which he didn’t. As he spoke, the scrub of the Nevada desert washed by me on either side of my car as I barreled back down the same interstate highway destined for Bob Walters’s house to try to wring out that one last piece of information: Who had the bloody knife? I use the descriptive bloody not like a Brit might, but in the most literal way possible.
Foley continued, “That was really a pile of shit, Jack. You were used by some fucking kook. You violated the privacy of two different families. You needlessly scared the crap out of an entire city. And you got in the way of a police investigation that is now stalled in its tracks because you and your fucking editors are desperately trying to sell newspapers on the misery of others.
“Otherwise, great job, you asshole.”
“So you liked it?”
That I did say, though he didn’t respond. I think he was too busy disemboweling a bunny at his desk or something. I was also starting to rethink my theory that I was uniquely capable of maintaining great relationships with law enforcement types, mostly because I could relate to them so well. If this was an example of a great relationship, then Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley had a terrific marriage.
I said, “So you don’t think there’s a serial killer in town?”
He responded, “I’m not saying a fucking word to you, except that by rushing that story into print, you just validated that lunatic talk-show host. And if there is a serial killer in town, you just made it one hell of a lot harder for us to catch him — and you can quote me on that, but you won’t, because you’re too chickenshit.”
Don’t bet on that. His answer was interesting, though, the profanity aside, because it represented what former Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee famously described during Watergate as a “non-denial denial.” Mac Foley wasn’t actually denying the existence of a serial killer. What he was saying is that by reporting on it, I was making his job tougher — which I hate to say, or maybe I don’t, wasn’t really my concern. Because by reporting on a serial killer, I was also prompting hundreds of thousands of women in the city to take precautions, maybe saving lives. I’m not saying police wanted him to kill again, but every murder provides them with fresh possibilities for clues, and unreported or underreported murders allow police the luxury of time to find out who committed them.
I said, barely able to conceal my increasing disdain, “If you can hold yourself together for a moment, I wanted to share with you some new correspondence from the Phantom Fiend.”
Silence. I can only imagine how much he hated the fact that his investigation was dependent on a reporter for information — an investigation that would now fall under intense scrutiny because of that same reporter. Actually, I can more than imagine, because here’s what he said: “Flynn, if you try playing any games with me, if you so much as hiccup before you get me every tiny little piece of information that comes your way from whoever this is that’s calling themselves the Phantom Fiend, I’ll have you grabbed off the street and thrown in front of a grand jury so fast that you won’t be able to change out of the panties that you fucking reporters probably wear. And that’s if I’m in a good mood. If I’m in a bad mood, you’ll end up spending some time at the county jail.”
I rolled my eyes, even