Strangled - Brian McGrory [77]
I decided against that. Instead, I stepped out of the room into the lobby, where I had been surrounded by my comrades-in-words twenty minutes earlier and dialed the number that was on the bottom of the message. It rang three times before the recorded voice of a woman came on announcing that this line didn’t take incoming calls, and to please check the number again and try redialing. I did as told, as I occasionally do, with the same result.
Before I could place the next call that I wanted to make, my phone vibrated again, this time with Peter Martin’s number on the caller ID.
“Are you watching this bullshit?” I said, picking up the phone.
“I was,” he said, his tone less calm than it had been the night before. “Right now I’m watching something else. I’m watching a video of Kimberly May’s apartment on a blog site called Hubaloo.com — ‘all the news the Record won’t print.’ They’ve got the entire clip, and they’re showing her body unimpeded — just a dead girl on the web. I don’t know how they got it — a police department leak, or whether your Phantom gave it to them. But right now the site has so many hits that it’s already crashed twice on me while I’m watching.”
“Clever name and slogan,” I said. At the same time, I swore under my breath — stupid goddamned bloggers, freaks of nature who sit around their dingy apartments in ratty bathrobes and black socks posting total crap on the web and thinking it counts as hipster journalism, the next big thing.
“I’ll tell you one thing,” Martin said, his tone growing uncharacteristically angry now. “Seeing this makes me truly believe we did the right thing by not running it. The ad people could die because of the dollars we would have made, but not worth it.”
Then he asked, “You on your way back here?” I thought so at the time, so I answered in the affirmative. We hung up and I placed an immediate call to Vinny Mongillo in the newsroom. I asked him to check with his phone company sources on the number that appeared at the bottom of the text message. He put me on hold, came back, and said, “That traces to one of those disposable cells. It was purchased with cash. There’s no name on the account. You’re out of luck.”
“Could you check and see if they know what other calls were made from that phone? Maybe I can track down someone who was called by the owner.”
“Already did, Fair Hair. No other calls to this point.”
“You think they’d be willing to monitor it for future use?”
“They’re already planning on it.”
“Dinner tonight?” I asked.
“Well, now you owe me, so at a place of my choosing. You’re on your way in here? We need to go over the Paul Vasco information. We should be able to pay a call on him at our earliest convenience.”
“Which may well be today. I’ll be in shortly.”
The door to the media room flung open and the reporters and their cameramen poured out en masse. The press conference was over. Within minutes, CNN, FOX News, MSNBC, and, later, the three networks would authoritatively report that the serial killer was profiled by crime analysts as being a history buff in search of attention that he never got in his everyday life, careful and media-savvy, a new Boston Strangler for a new generation.
And that serial killer would soon be telling me things I wasn’t ready to hear.
22
I quite literally jumped out of the Navigator as Toby glided to a stop at the front door of the Boston Record. I bounded up the few stairs and into the glassed-in front lobby, where Edgar Sullivan was there to greet me.
“They don’t pay you enough, Edgar,” I said, striding past him as he leaned on the reception desk.
He began walking alongside me, keeping pace, the two of us heading side by side toward the escalator. He replied in a confiding voice, “Are you kidding me? Most guys my age are sitting on