Strangled - Brian McGrory [82]
I haven’t even tried taking a step in a year.
Why on that one day would he have ever thought to have tried? The likely answer: he didn’t.
Mongillo, fully nourished now, piped up. “I’m with Jack on this. Since when do we hold shit back? Since when do we climb in the sack with the cops, rather than serve as a check on them, and without even a promise of exclusive information if this thing pans out? Since when do we not warn the damned public about what we know, when we know it?”
He paused, seemingly getting more wound up, then added, “This shit is life and death. This isn’t some journalism exercise about confirming a source. This is about letting women know they’re in dire danger out there.”
I added, “Hal Harrison doesn’t want people to think there’s danger because he’s running for mayor. Mara Laird doesn’t want people to think there’s danger because she is the mayor. We don’t get this letter into print, we’re not doing our jobs.”
Again, silence, until Martin asked, “You don’t think that by printing this letter, verbatim, that we’re turning over editorial control of the newspaper to a serial killer?”
A good point. But let’s face it, like it or not, what the Phantom Fiend had to say — that the Boston Strangler lives, that they had it wrong before, that they’re getting it wrong again — was news, blockbuster news, actually. And this was the same sort of journalistic issue that the editors of The New York Times and The Washington Post wrestled with in 1995 before finally deciding to publish the Unabomber’s manifesto, as he had requested. The publication led to his arrest.
I said all this, and Justine and Martin simply nodded in response, though Justine also noted that with the Unabomber case, federal officials were pushing the newspapers to publish because they had a paucity of other clues. In this case, Boston PD claimed to have other clues that needed to be pursued, and didn’t want the published letter to get in its way.
This was getting frustrating. Martin was being deferential to his boss. And his boss, Steele, was being entirely too corporate, far more cautious than she typically was, or at least used to be when she was editor. Maybe it was the lawsuits that newspapers were losing around the country. Maybe it was the diving stock price. Maybe it was her friendship with Mara Lairdo. Maybe it was the barrage of accusations that the news media was growing irresponsible and increasingly cavalier about the truth. Hell, maybe she was losing her backbone. I glanced over at Mongillo and saw that he was gripping his balled-up sandwich wrapper so tight that the veins were popping through his wrist.
Martin said to both of us, “You’ve been very helpful.”
Gee, thanks, Peter. With that, we got up and left. When we got out of earshot, Mongillo said, “I’ve got a suspected serial strangler we need to go see.”
Hey, why not? We already seemed to be getting the life choked out of us.
23
At first — and I should probably be embarrassed to admit this — I almost didn’t recognize her voice.
“Hey, Jack,” she said. That was followed by a long pause. “I’m back in Boston,” she continued. I was still somewhat confused at this point, sitting at my desk, listening to my messages before Vinny Mongillo and I headed out into this great city in a bold attempt to change its fate.
“I’m a little bit ashamed,” she said.
That’s when it struck: it was the elusive Maggie Kane — my fiancée, or again, maybe that’s ex-fiancée, or perhaps it’s simpler to just describe her as my would-be wife, the woman I had been planning to marry a week before, until the morning I wasn’t. We were supposed to be splashing around in the Hawaiian surf right about now, sharing frozen strawberry daiquiris at a swim-up bar, relentlessly having sex in our overpriced room as a sea breeze drifted through the open French doors.
Her voice started to waver at this point. “I feel awful,” she said. “I feel stupid. I