Strangled - Brian McGrory [91]
He said, “Do you think it was me who couldn’t help but jack off on the floor beside so many of those corpses? Do you think I had absolutely no control, that I’d risk having someone walk into the room?”
I asked, “Were you the Strangler?”
He laughed. It wasn’t a soft laugh, or a subtle laugh, or a fun laugh. No, it was a howl, equal parts indignation and pride. For all his protestations, he liked to be asked, to be considered in the game, capable of such heinous acts, smart enough to have had his secret sprawl across four decades, constantly probed but never penetrated.
He wasn’t answering, so I said, “Well, I’ll put it to you again: Were you the Boston Strangler?”
He rubbed his hands across the top of his smooth head, looked up at me with those funereal eyes, and said, “What difference does any of this make? What fucking difference? People live, people die, or as Plato said, ‘Must not all things be swallowed up in death?’ ”
“In time, yes. In time,” I said. “But must not nature be allowed to work its course?”
“Death is better, a milder fate than tyranny,” Vasco replied.
“That’s Aeschylus, the father of Greek tragedy.”
“But isn’t it a tyrant who takes a person’s life?”
Look, I don’t know where I was getting this stuff from, and I certainly don’t know how Paul Vasco was pulling these quotes from Greek writers and philosophers out of thin air — or maybe it was his ass he was pulling them from. Either that or he really was that smart, or at least well read.
The bottom line — as I looked at him, squirrel-faced, his black eyes darting about the room as he puffed on his stupid cigarette — was I wanted to grab his neck and squeeze it to show him what it felt like to be on the other side of the situation. I wanted to shake him, to beat a confession out of him that he had already seemed to start, and to know there wouldn’t be any more young women’s driver’s licenses arriving in my mail. Normally I like being at the center of a story, breaking news, but this one, no, and even less so with every passing moment.
I asked, “Mr. Vasco, have you been writing me notes? Have you been sending me the driver’s licenses of your victims?”
He looked at me with that something that leaned toward a smirk, a matter-of-fact, shoulder shrug of a look that pretty much said the victims were worthless and the efforts to solve their murders would be entirely fruitless.
He stared into my eyes and said, “You fancy yourself a writer, Mr. Flynn. You ever read the work of Robert Heinlein, the greatest science fiction author who ever lived?”
I couldn’t say I had, so I didn’t.
Vasco held my gaze and said, “Mr. Heinlein once famously said, and I think this is an exact quote, but please don’t think less of me if I’m wrong, ‘Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.’ ”
He paused and added, confidingly now, “I’ve been writing for a long time. I follow Mr. Heinlein’s sage counsel. I do it in private.”
Mongillo, growing impatient with the upscale discourse, said angrily, “Mr. Vasco, let’s cut through the crap. Did you kill women then? Are you killing women now?”
He didn’t answer. Instead, he flicked his cigarette butt the few feet across the room, toward a squat metal pail filled with other butts and an old Jim Beam bottle. Problem was, he missed, and the cigarette landed on the decrepit wood floor, the plume of smoke rising up the wall toward the low ceiling. I followed the smoke for reasons I can’t explain, followed the little cloud until it rose past my waist, then my head, and that’s when I realized what it was that I saw.
Set amid the glossy, raunchy pornography was something a world apart: three photographs, one each of Jill Dawson, Lauren Hutchens, and Kimberly May. The pictures were carefully cut out of the Record, then meticulously adhered to identical cardboard mats, hung side by side. Above them was a much larger photograph of two bare-chested blondes, a garden hose, and — well,