I said to Martin, “Why don’t you just find out where he is, for starters. We’ll figure out tomorrow’s lunch plan later.”
He hung up. The camera took a left into a rear bedroom of what Realtors call a floor-thru apartment. For whatever reason, I became instantly drawn in by the image, my spine feeling a slight chill. I wasn’t entirely sure why until I took a harder, more focused look. Unlike the front room and kitchen, the bedroom was in a state of disarray, as if it had been ransacked. Items had been knocked off a bureau and could be seen scattered on the carpeted floor — loose change, a makeup kit, a jewelry chest. A closet door was ajar. Clothes were flung here and there. A desk chair had been flipped on its side. If this was a real estate promotion, I’d want a new Realtor.
That’s when the camera casually but abruptly focused on the rumpled bed, and clear as day, which is when this shot was taken, I could see the woman who had been shown in the photograph on the refrigerator door.
She was sprawled on top of a white comforter, dead, her eyes wide open, her tight purple tank top lifted above her bare breasts. She was completely disrobed from the waist down. She had her head propped up on a pair of pillows. Her bare legs were parted wide, one of them bent awkwardly under her at the knee. She had what looked to be a pair of nylons wrapped around her neck in a ligature, tightened into a knot, and then tied into a looping bow just beneath her chin. I could see blood in her right ear, and drops and smears of blood on the sheets. Her face looked unsettlingly serene, as if death came as a relief from what she had gone through in the moments before it.
The camera casually lingered on her body the same way it did on the coffee table and the refrigerator door, as if this body was nothing more than another inanimate object in what was now a completely lifeless apartment. And then the image simply went blank, a circle appearing in the screen where the video had just played. My eyes remained frozen on it, as if at any moment anything else could appear. After a few long seconds, I clicked the video player off, placed the laptop on the passenger seat beside me, and took a couple of long, deep breaths. When I shut my eyes, I could see the woman’s face, her brown hair matted against her right temple, her sharp blue eyes, her slightly chubby cheeks. Someone’s girlfriend, someone’s daughter, someone’s friend, maybe someone’s aunt. And my bet is, I was the only living person besides her killer who knew she was dead.
I pounded out Martin’s number. He, in turn, put Edgar on another conference line, as well as Vinny Mongillo and Monica Gonsalves. She e-mailed the three of them the link, and all three watched it in silence as we stayed on the line. Well, almost silence. At the key moment, I heard Martin mutter, “What the frick.” Mongillo gasped. Poor Edgar simply said, “Dear Jesus.”
Martin cleared his throat and asked, “Okay, now what?”
I replied, “The Phantom has struck again. Problem is, we don’t know where. He didn’t give us any indication here.”
“Much as I hate to let this story get away from us, we need to get a copy of this to the cops, right?” Martin asked.
Before I could say anything, Mongillo said, “This will at least prove that we were right in reporting the likelihood of a serial killer in today’s story.”
Mongillo was right. So was Martin. I offered to get the police a copy of the e-mail, because I had to return Detective Mac Foley’s call anyway.
Martin was adopting that calm tone he gets as a story grows more chaotic. He said, “My impression is that this is a reportable event, this video. We opened the door today. We can’t shut it on more news now.”
Mongillo said, “Unless we start getting every two-bit prankster in the world. How do we prevent that, and how do we know beef from baloney?”
Martin asked, “Why the frick didn’t the person who sent this disc give us a fricking address?”
Before I could say anything, Edgar cleared his throat and announced, “He did.”
There was a moment of silence as Edgar — intentionally, I suspect — let the drama build. He finally continued, saying, “The cameraman scanned some magazines on the coffee table. He more than scanned them, he lingered on them. While you gentlemen were discussing the story, I pulled that part of the clip out, froze it, and magnified it on my screen. If you look closely at the magazines, they all contain the same name and address on the front: Kimberly May at 284 Commonwealth Avenue in Boston.” He paused, then said, “It’s in the Back Bay.”
Where was Edgar Sullivan before he came to the Record, at Scotland Yard? Make him a reporter and we’d be a virtual lock on a Pulitzer Prize.
“I’ll shoot it over to police,” I said.
Mongillo added, “I’m on my way to the scene. I will not get in the way. I will not get in the way. I will not get in the way.”
Rest assured, he was about to get in the way.
Martin said, “Flynn, get your ass in the seat of a plane. I don’t care what it costs.”
Those are words he had never before uttered.
“Peter, are you all right?” I asked.
His tone was calm, but his words were not. “No,” he said. “This story’s about to get a whole lot bigger before it goes away. We’ve all got to be ready for that.”
He was right, as he usually is. We hung up. I threw the car into drive. I still had one more stop to make before the long journey home.
18
I’m trying to remember what life was like before cellular communications, back when we thought the earth was flat and the Celtics would forever be a dynasty and the afternoon paper would always be people’s primary, if not only, source of news. Times change. The NASDAQ, it ends up, can also go down. The Red Sox can win a World Series. And you don’t need to be particularly bright or enlightening to make it as a star political analyst on cable TV.
But where were we before the cell phone, besides listening to eight-track cartridges of Barry White and thinking they’ll never make another show funnier than Laugh-In, which maybe they haven’t, though that’s not really the point. The point was that out here in the Nevada desert, Verizon and all its technological marvels had instilled in me a certain amount of freedom, and I chose to use that freedom to place a call from my rental car to Mac Foley of the Boston PD.
A rather gruff gentleman answered the phone and tersely announced, “Homicide.”
“Is Detective Foley in, please?”
“No.”
Silence. And some people wonder why reporters and cops generally have such a tough time getting along. If you strip everything else away, I think it’s because reporters, by their very nature, like to communicate, to put their thoughts into words and use those words to enlighten. Cops, at least the ones inevitably assigned to answer the phones, don’t like to talk — except, maybe, to one another.
I said, “Could I leave a message for him?”
“Sure.”
I’d like to see this guy consoling the grieving relatives of a newly made victim. The odd thing is, he was probably pretty good at it, all his emotions spare but heartfelt.
“Could you tell him that Jack Flynn called.”
“Hold on.”
He didn’t, though, bother putting me on hold. Instead I heard the receiver clank on what sounded like a metal desktop. Then I heard him yell, “Hey, Mac, the asshole is on line one.”
I could vaguely hear a distant voice reply, “Which asshole?”
“The big one.”
The phone clicked and another voice came on and announced, “Foley here.”
“Jack Flynn calling.”
“Jack,” he said, his tone surprisingly upbeat, “you outdid yourself. I thought I’d seen a lot of bad, sleazy reporting in my fortysomething years on the job here, but in today’s fish wrap, you turned sleaziness into an art form.”