Strangled - Brian McGrory [71]
Edgar had an SUV waiting, the kind of vehicle that celebrities are always getting into the moment they leave the courthouse where they face various securities or molestation charges. We climbed into the back. The driver I didn’t recognize. Edgar simply said, “Over to the Record,” and we were gone. To me he said, “Welcome home. Peter and I agreed that this was the best way to assure that you would get safely back into town without being followed. Toby here” — the driver, a balding and rather burly man, turned around briefly and waved — “is a former linebacker for the Chicago Bears. He’ll accompany you wherever you need to go for the time being.”
Truth is, I didn’t mind. Every once in a while, I still shivered from that night earlier in the week spent flailing in the cold, murky waters of the Charles. And I don’t think I’ll ever get the sound of the gunshot out of my head that killed that innocent guy in the Public Garden two days before, then the woman screaming that he was dying, her voice rising in the early spring air before fading into the wind.
By the time I walked into the Record, it was nearing midnight. Didn’t matter. Peter Martin arrived at my desk about a minute after I did, though rather than being a bundle of jangled nerves, he was in that zone of calm that he gets into when the world around him gets particularly frenzied.
“Welcome back,” he said. He said this in the same mechanically calm tone that one of the Stepford Wives might use to welcome her husband home from work.
“Thank you. Are you okay?”
“Fine, yes. Just fine. We need to go over some things.”
He pulled up a chair next to my desk.
He said, “Okay, the cops went to Commonwealth Avenue. Kimberly May indeed lived there. Second floor.”
Already, I’m thinking to myself, life in the past tense. This wasn’t going to be good, not for Kimberly May, not for the women who would inevitably cross my desk after her.
He continued, “No answer at the door, so they knocked it down. Mongillo was downstairs and could hear the whole thing. They found Kimberly exactly as she was shown on the video sent to you, dead for what they think was at least a full day, maybe two.”
I asked, “We’re going with it for morning, right?” That was newspaper speak for the next day’s paper.
Martin replied, “Full bore. Leading with the murder. Second graph is the fact that Record reporter Jack Flynn was sent a videotape of the apartment and the body by the person who apparently committed the murder. Flynn, in turn, contacted police. Police rushed to the address supplied by the Record and discovered the body. Record saves the day, though we don’t use those exact words.”
I said, “Not for Kimberly May.”
He nodded. “Point taken,” he said.
He added, “Then the issue became, do we post the video online?”
“What the fuck?”
Martin said, “It’s a tough market out there. We have a video of a murder scene given to us by a murderer. We shade out the actual corpse. Why not get it out there? It has a hell of a lot of value.”
I said, “Value to who? What kind of value are you talking about? Allowing people to be voyeuristic? To see a dead woman’s apartment, the place where she was killed? Like I said, Peter, what the fuck?”
Martin said, “Yeah, that’s why we didn’t do it. But bet the farm the Traveler would if this video was sent to them, and that’s my fear. You know, the Phantom is upping the ante here, from driver’s licenses to real visuals like this video. He may want this thing in the public realm. By us not putting it there, he may shop it around somewhere else.”
That kind of talk reminded me of my conversation with the guy on the phone who claimed to be the Phantom