Speaking of which, I didn’t see him. Of course, I didn’t expect him to be padding around the Skywalk with one of those stickers on the front of his jacket that says, “Hello, my name is Phantom Fiend.” But I didn’t see anyone who looked the part. Actually, I didn’t see anyone at all, which didn’t entirely thrill me.
So I went to the assigned telescope, which, as described, was tucked into the corner overlooking both the Charles River and downtown Boston. The morning sun sparkled on the calm skin of the water and flashed on the distant office towers. In the distance, the newly clean water of Boston Harbor looked nearly turquoise.
I had no change for the telescope and wasn’t of the mind to walk back into the lobby to get any, so I stood and drank in the view with my bare eyes. Vehicles in miniature dawdled down Boylston Street fifty stories below, reminding me of the Matchbox cars my father used to bring home for me when I was a kid. Down on the street, people were but insignificant little specks flitting about, and I couldn’t help but think that’s how the Phantom regarded them in life as well as in death — as insignificant, a means toward a very temporary gratification, or maybe just a step in his pursuit of fame.
I wondered if on a clear day you could see Hawaii. Probably not. And then I realized I was facing the wrong way, which I deemed to be something of a metaphor, though for what, I wasn’t exactly sure. I did know one thing for certain: it would be nice if Maggie picked up the phone and gave me a call. That said, I hadn’t actually broken a finger dialing her cell phone number, either.
Just then my phone rang. I looked at the incoming number and saw it was “Unavailable.” I answered with my trademark, clipped “Jack Flynn here.”
“I told you to go alone and you’re not,” the Phantom said.
I looked down the long, sun-soaked expanse of the Skywalk in both directions and saw an older man in a Red Sox cap and sunglasses peering through a telescope. From the way he was standing, favoring one leg, I assumed it was Edgar. I replied, “I wasn’t followed, and I haven’t used my phone.”
The Phantom didn’t respond directly to that assertion. Instead, he said without a hint of impatience, “Leave the Prudential Center complex. Drive by taxi to the September 11th memorial in the Public Garden. Go there right away. Again, do not use your cell phone or contact anyone about anything. I will meet you there.”
This Phantom was lucky I had a lot of time on my hands. Truth is, I was starting to doubt his last assertion, that he’d meet me there, and was wondering if this might be some sort of wild serial killer chase, meaning I was going to come away empty-handed and still without a story for the next day’s Record. That being the case, I suspected good old Barry Bor would be getting another call on his show, and I’d have yet another miserable morning to follow.
I did as told again. Should I ever reunite with Maggie Kane, this was probably pretty good practice at being married. Again, a cab happened to be out front, but I was less suspicious because it was an actual cabstand. I rode the six blocks down to the Public Garden in anxious silence, got out at the corner of the park, and walked along the sidewalk of Arlington Street toward the main entrance at the base of Commonwealth Avenue.
This park was also familiar ground. It’s where I got engaged to be married, where I first told a former live-in girlfriend named Elizabeth Riggs that I loved her as we tromped through the sunlit snow one Sunday morning in the calm aftermath of a bad blizzard, where I last saw former Record publisher Paul Ellis alive the morning he was murdered in the parking lot of his newspaper. And now I was heading for this memorial built in honor of 202 Massachusetts residents killed in the attack on the World Trade Center in New York; many of the people were aboard the two planes that were hijacked shortly after leaving Logan Airport on the morning of September 11.
When I was about thirty yards from the park gates, I saw a cab roll to a stop at the entrance. The door flung open and a well dressed young man — I say well dressed and young because he looked similar to me — stepped out and strode purposefully inside the park in the direction of the September 11 memorial. Across the wrought-iron fence and through the defoliated trees that separated the Public Garden from Arlington Street, I could see the man sit on one of the stone benches facing a memorial wall etched with the names of all the victims. I slowed down, curious. He slouched with his two hands folded under his chin. He then hung his head low, his hands holding the back of his neck in what I guessed was sad contemplation.
I kept walking toward the gates of the Public Garden, but slower now. I didn’t know if this was the man I was supposed to meet. If it was, I was shocked at his age, which, like I said, was close to mine. I had anticipated someone much older, from the voice on the phone and the fact that the original Boston stranglings had occurred forty-plus years before. More likely, the guy was simply a visitor to the memorial, and a visitor who looked like he wanted some time alone.
It was when I was walking through the grand front gates, toward the memorial, that I heard what could have been a car backfiring, or someone setting off firecrackers, but I knew instantly to my core that it was something else entirely: gunshots. Reflexively, I ran my hands down my arms and torso to see if I had been the target. I felt nothing liquid, which was good. I also didn’t feel any pain, which was better. The sound had come from the area of the memorial, so I instinctively hunched low along the evergreen bushes and trotted along the cement path toward the man I had seen earlier.
I had run maybe twenty yards when, without warning, a figure in black blasted from one of the bushes and slammed directly into my face and chest with such ferocious force that we were both knocked to the ground. My head bounced on the pavement, causing me to see the clichéd stars of comic-book fame. More to the point, I also saw a handgun clank on the ground a few feet from my left arm. Without thinking, which is probably why I did it, I lunged for it, but the guy who knocked me over had already scrambled to his feet and dove on the weapon just ahead of me. He then leapt back up and sprinted toward the park entrance. I climbed unsteadily to my feet and set off in an uncertain pursuit.
I had staggered but a dozen or so steps when I saw the guy fling open the back door of an awaiting van along the curb of Arlington Street. I saw the van peel away. I heard a woman wailing in the distance, “He’s bleeding to death. Someone call for help. He’s dying.”
The next day’s paper would identify the victim as Joshua Carpenter, the husband of a flight attendant who was killed in the September 11, 2001, attack. His family would be quoted saying that, without the actual body of his wife, without a gravestone to mark it, he visited the memorial every morning to mourn her. Police would say that he was the victim of a brazen daylight robbery, and that uniformed officers and plainclothes detectives were calling in all their informants and scouring the city’s most drug-addled sections for any tips on the killers.
I knew it wasn’t a robbery. I knew this poor man wasn’t the intended victim. And I knew as well that the cops would never find the killer.
But that’s all I knew, and that was a huge problem.
13
My plane bounced down at McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas, as if the pilot was in as big a rush to get to the tables as everyone else. Everyone but me, that is. I had come here to gamble, though not in the same way that my fellow passengers likely would. No, I was in Vegas to pay a visit to one Bob Walters, once one of the lead investigators on the Boston Strangler case, a lieutenant detective now retired from the Boston Police Department for some twenty years.