She continued to stare at me. I snuck a glance, then looked down at the floor in silence, my arms folded across my chest. The Harvard Medical School’s psychology department could do a case study in our body language here.
I quietly added, “None of this is your fault, by the way.”
I snuck another glance and saw a tear rolling down her cheek. This was not what I wanted.
So I said, “I’m desperate for some sleep. Is there any possible way I can get in my own bed and go to sleep for the night, and we’ll talk about this some other time?”
She asked, “Do you want me to stay or leave?”
Let’s not put too fine a point on it: I wanted her to leave. It was three-thirty in the morning. She skipped town on our wedding. She used her own keys to come unannounced into my apartment. I wanted to sprawl across my own bed for the next four hours unencumbered and unconcerned. But I didn’t have the energy for the scene that her departure would inevitably require.
“Why don’t you stay,” I said.
Ends up, those would be just about the last words we’d ever speak to each other. Maybe communication isn’t my strong suit, as Mongillo likes to remind me every time I write a story. When I got up the next day, Maggie was still asleep; when I got back to my apartment that night, she was long gone.
I climbed into bed. Two minutes later, I was already drifting off toward an unsteady slumber when I felt two paws beside me, then some tension, lifting, struggling, and then two more paws. Huck stepped methodically over my back and set himself down in the shallow valley between us, wrapping a paw over my head and resting his snout about two millimeters away from my ear.
At least something in this life was going right.
36
The sprawling lobby of Boston Police headquarters was oddly quiet when I walked through the double doors at ten o’clock on a Sunday morning for my meeting with Commissioner Hal Harrison — maybe due to the fact that Vinny Mongillo and his big mouth had been bailed out by the Record’s attorney about three hours before.
The silver-haired desk sergeant looked at me in silence. I said, “Jack Flynn of the Record here to see the commissioner.” He made a little clucking sound that seemed to emanate from the roof of his mouth, snapped up the phone, and in a moment a young cadet with neither a gun nor an attitude arrived to escort me upstairs.
The commissioner’s suite was empty, and I wondered if even the commissioner himself was in. The cadet asked me to sit in a little waiting lounge that looked to be designed by someone’s grandmother — a grandmother, though, who had an affinity for antique, wall-mounted guns. I didn’t sit, mostly because I was pretty tired of doing as told; standing was my little rebellion. Sometimes you draw your own line in life, even when no one else notices, and this happened to be mine.
The cadet disappeared, returned in a moment, and said, “The commissioner is ready to see you.” No power games here, which was good.
For whatever it’s worth, and maybe that’s nothing, I’ll note that I was feeling about as unsettled as I ever had before. Edgar was still dead, and that wasn’t going to change. Elizabeth Riggs was still threatened, and that wasn’t going to change, either, at least not until this serial murderer was captured. The good news there was that she still had the estimable Hank Sweeney at her side. The bad news was that in the meantime, other women might still die.
All the while, something was clattering around in the hollow spaces of my mind, little shards of information that I needed to piece into actual enlightenment — things people said, stuff they did that didn’t add up, or maybe they did and that was the problem, that I couldn’t do the math. Sometimes it felt like the shards were coming together, creating a whole, and then they’d suddenly blow apart, leaving me grasping at air, figuratively, if not literally as well.
“Nice of you to come in on your day off, Jack.”
That was Commissioner Hal Harrison, standing behind that big oak desk of his, wearing a beige V-neck sweater and a pair of carefully pressed blue pants, the crease so tight you could cut a steak with it, and not some soft tenderloin but a thick sirloin or a well-marbled rib eye.
He leaned over his desk and extended his hand, and as we shook, I almost laughed at the notion of a day off, like I was going to kick back at home with a bag of Fritos and a six-pack of Sam Adams and watch March Madness on TV, not a worry in this delightful little world that we all share. Of course, that made me think again of the Hawaiian resort that was charging me for not being there, which made me think of the prior night with Maggie Kane, which made me happy not to be at that resort. Suddenly, work seemed good. See, life’s really simple, even when it doesn’t necessarily feel that way.
“Nice of you to have me,” I said, the two of us maintaining the veneer of politeness.
The commissioner leaned to the side of his high-backed leather chair. I took a seat across the desk from him. He said, “Jack, you’re a young pup. You weren’t here back in the early sixties when this Strangler stuff was exploding around this town. You don’t have a feel for what it did to Boston, to the people, to the cops like me and the prosecutors I worked with trying to get a handle on it.”
He paused and looked at me, hard. I held firm to his gaze.
“I was here,” he said. “I was in the middle of it. I was one of the lead detectives on the biggest, most comprehensive, most demanding investigations this department has ever undertaken.”
God how politicians love the word I, and that’s what Hal Harrison had become — a politician. You could see it all over his face. You could hear it wrapped around his every word. He wasn’t so much concerned about the victims who had already been killed or those who were about to be. No, he was concerned about his own future, meaning whether this murder spree was going to get in the way of his becoming mayor.
Clank, clank, clank. There were those shards of information, bumping against intuition, almost coming together, painfully close but not quite. And then it all fell apart again, like when you can’t remember someone’s name even when it’s right there on the tip of your tongue.
“Let me tell you, Jack, it wasn’t a good time for this city. Jack Kennedy was assassinated right in the middle of it all. The Vietnam War was brewing. The country was going through huge changes. And we had some bastard, some absolute bastard, strangling women to death right in our midst.”
I didn’t know where he was going with any of this, so I simply sat in silence and went along for the unusual ride. I could hear church bells peal in the distance. I momentarily imagined older women in their Sunday best marching tentatively into Mass and praying for the safety of their daughters amid this murder spree. My eyes drifted toward the big windows, which revealed a gray, dank morning outside, moist, but still without any rain.
Harrison continued. “We worked like dogs. I worked. A guy by the name of Lieutenant Bob Walters, a good man, my immediate superior, worked. Stu Callaghan worked up in the attorney general’s office. We worked ourselves to the bone, morning, noon, and night. I couldn’t even begin to tell you how many leads we pursued, how many tips we chased, how many doors we broke down, how many suspects we interrogated, always grabbing at nothing more than straws and air.”
He paused, collecting himself, surprised, I sensed, at his own eloquence. Maybe he truly was speaking from the heart. Maybe his words flowed out unrehearsed. I usually know these things, but for the moment I couldn’t tell.
“And then we caught ourselves a good old-fashioned break. Jack, we got a confession. Albert DeSalvo knew those murder scenes cold…”
He began explaining just how well DeSalvo knew them, sharing details with me about the intricacies of the various scenes. Meantime, my brain cut out — not over something he said, but something he didn’t. He did not include Detective Mac Foley on his honor roll of those who worked the case hard way back when, and given my suspicions now, this became more than interesting.