by R. G. Belsky
“Read the message, Gil,” she said. “I decided I needed to make as big a media splash as possible with my next victim. So how do I do that? Well, it’s really pretty simple when you think about it. . . .”
“Who is it?” I repeated.
There was a click on the phone and she was gone.
I opened up the email from Claudia Borrell and read it:
No dumb blonde jokes this time, Gil. No time for that now. People always assume blondes are dumb, don’t they?
Think about Marilyn Monroe. She was the biggest movie star in the world, the most famous movie star in history. But she was a joke too. Just a blonde joke.
And remember Jayne Mansfield? How she played the part of the airhead bimbo in all those ’50s (and very sexist) movies like “The Girl Can’t Help It.” Everyone figured that was the way she was in real life too. She wasn’t, but no one cared about the truth. She wound up losing her head (literally) in a car crash, which seems slightly ironic for the woman everyone called a blonde airhead. Well, at least she wasn’t a blonde anymore. Ha! Ha!
The list goes on and on.
Farrah Fawcett. A great actress, a great talent. Did you ever see her dramatic performance in “The Burning Bed”? But people remember her as silly Jill from “Charlie’s Angels” and the ultimate poster girl with that big blonde hairdo from the ’70s.
Jessica Simpson. Loni Anderson. Pamela Anderson. Well, you get the idea. . . .
So I’m here to teach a lesson to all of you men out there. Not all blondes are dumb. Some of us, believe it or not, are just as smart as you. Or, in my case, smarter. A lot smarter.
Ask Walter Issacs, Rick Faris, Tim Hammacher, Joe Delvecchio, and Mike Jacobson about that!
And so now the game goes on.
Except with a difference.
You see, I’m going to change the rules a bit.
Up the ante.
Raise the stakes for you. . . .
And so I’ve been following my next victim, recording his every move—waiting for the right moment to move in for the kill.
Enjoy the pictures, Gil!
There was a photo attachment to the email. I opened it and found a series of pictures. They were pictures of me. Me on the way to work. Me going into my apartment. Me at the grocery store. Me walking down the street. And most shocking of all was a picture of me hugging Susan outside a restaurant before she got into a cab.
At the bottom of all these pictures, Claudia Borrell had written:
Looking forward to meeting you in person, Gil. I’m going to show you this time firsthand how much fun blondes can be—although I’m afraid it won’t be much fun for you. Walter Issacs, Rick Faris, Tim Hammacher, Mark Jacobson, Joe Delvecchio—and now Gil Malloy. See you real soon!
Part VI
BLONDE ICE
CHAPTER 48
I DON’T need police protection,” I said to Marilyn. “I can’t do my job that way.”
“This woman wants to kill you.”
“A lot of women have said they want to kill me.”
No one laughed. It was a big meeting in Marilyn’s office, and everyone was very serious. Marilyn. Stacy. Other editors. Wohlers was there too. Also the Daily News attorney, the head of HR, and a public relations person.
“She’s stalking you,” Marilyn said.
“Okay, she has some pictures.”
“Pictures of you doing everything you do all day,” Wohlers said. “She put them in the letter to tell us that she’s got you in her sights next, Malloy.”
“You need police protection, Gil,” Stacy said. “We want to make sure you’re safe.”
Stacy, of all people, was worried about me. I didn’t figure she had human compassion for anyone. I guess putting up those big Web traffic numbers like I’d been doing was the key to a girl like Stacy’s heart.
In the end, it was the chance to play a role in the killer’s eventual capture—and be on the inside of the big story —that convinced me to go along with the police protection plan.
Wohlers laid it all out for us.
“It’s not just protection,” he said. “It’s a stakeout. A trap. And you’re the bait. We never knew where she was going to strike before. But now she’s made a mistake. She tipped us off that you’re her next target. My men will always be around you. Not close enough that she sees them, but close enough to see her if she comes anywhere near you. So, when she does make her move, we’ll be there. Then we’ve got her.”
“And what happens to me?”
“We catch her before she does anything to you.”
“Ideally.”
I looked around the room at everyone waiting for me to say whether I’d cooperate or not.
“How about I just get out of town for a while?” I asked. “The paper could put me up, all expenses paid, at some remote beachside hotel—like in Tahiti or the Caribbean somewhere—until this all blows over. Or what’s the situation with the witness protection program these days? That could be fun too. Just disappear into that. New name, new identity, new life—just say goodbye to Gil Malloy forever. Of course, I realize you would all miss me terribly, but . . .”
“Will you help us, Malloy?” Wohlers asked.
“Sure, I’ll do it,” I said.
But, for the first time, I admitted something to myself at that moment. The quips were just my defense mechanism to cover up what a serious business all this really was. Despite my bravado, there was a part of me that wished I’d never gotten involved so personally in this story. All of the excitement, all the thrill of being part of the big exclusives that I had felt at the beginning—that was gone now. I just wanted the Blonde Ice story to be over. I’d seen enough of Claudia Borrell to know what she was capable of doing.
The stakeout of me would be a tricky one to pull off.
On the one hand, the cops had to make sure I stayed safe. Wohlers, before he left, talked about it with everyone in the room. “This man is sitting out there with a target on his back,” he said. “He’s depending on us to protect him. And that’s what we’re going to do. No matter what happens, we need to make certain that Gil Malloy is not killed, that Gil Malloy is not hurt, that Gil Malloy doesn’t even get a scratch out of all this.”
I was sure all aboard with that concept.
On the other hand, they couldn’t let Borrell know they were protecting me. They had to stay back, out of sight, until she made her move. Then they’d swoop in before she could claim another victim. That was the plan, Wohlers said, and he expressed great confidence that it would work. It sure sounded like a good plan. But, as that great philosopher Mike Tyson used to say, “Everyone’s got a plan until they get punched in the face.”
The basics were that a team of cops would be tailing me at all times. At home. At work. On the street, in restaurants. Whatever I did during the day or night, there would be cops watching and protecting me from Borrell. It wasn’t like she was a sniper pinpointing a target afar from a window or passing car. This woman worked up close. Lured her targets somewhere else to kill them. That’s what she’d done with all of her victims. Only this time they’d be ready for her.
At least I hoped they would be.
Wohlers was certainly taking no chances though. He had double teams of detectives and cops assigned to me at all times. One primary team, plus a backup team in case anything went wrong with the primary squad. No way they could miss her, I told myself. Not a chick that looked like that.
There was plenty more security too. They even decided to put listening equipment in my apartment in case anything happened there while I was out of their sight.
“They’ll hear everything that goes on in my apartment?” I said when they told me about that.
“Everything,” Wohlers said.
“Even in the bedroom?”
“Yes.”
“What if I take a girl home and you know, get lucky . . .”
“Then we’ll hear that too.”
“Wow, I always said that if those walls could
ever talk . . .”
“They’d probably yawn,” Wohlers grunted.
But, like I said, the quips were just my defense mechanism—maybe they were Wohlers’s too—to cover up how serious of a business this all was. Sure, we were acting like it was a game. Except we both knew it was no game.
No matter how many precautions everyone took, I wouldn’t rest easy until Claudia Borrell was finally in custody.
CHAPTER 49
I THINK I know how she overpowered her victims,” Susan said.
We were sitting in her office at the district attorney’s building in Foley Square. All the awards and plaques honoring her were still up on her desk and the wall behind her. But I noticed that the picture of her ex-husband Dan or Dale or whatever was now gone. There was a big space on the desk where it had been sitting. I took this as a good sign for me. Of course, it would have been better if she’d had a big picture of Gil Malloy there. I thought about suggesting that to her, but decided it might be a tad pushy.
“Karate or some other kind of martial arts?” I asked.
She shook her head no.
“It’s gotta be more than that. Even if she were an expert in martial arts, she couldn’t be sure she’d overpower every man she chose as one of her victims. Most of them were pretty big and in relatively good shape. Plus, any of them could have been into judo or some other kind of fighting thing too. She couldn’t depend on that. So I started going through all of the possible alternative scenarios she might have used to gain control over them. Kinky sex. A gun, even though she never used one that we’re aware of. Even hypnosis. But, in the end, there was only one thing that made sense. She drugged them.”
Susan picked up a computer printout from her desk and handed it to me. There was data from a lot of medical websites. The title at the top of the page said: “Date Rape Drugs.”
“We always hear about date rape drugs,” Susan said. “It’s usually men using them against women. A guy slips one into a woman’s drink. The date rape drug knocks her out, makes her vulnerable to be raped while she’s in that condition. Sometimes she might not even remember what happened afterward. That’s how powerful these drugs are.
“There are three different date rape drugs that are the most common. Rohypnol. GHB. And Ketamine. There’s street names for them too. Liquid Ecstasy. Trip and Fall. Roofies. Mind Erasers. Super Acid. Psychedelic Heroin.
“All of these drugs are very powerful. They knock you out quickly without you even realizing what happened. Alcohol makes them even stronger. So putting them in someone’s drink is the most efficient way of delivering the drug.
“Once a victim was drugged, he would become weak and confused. Even if he were aware of what was happening, he’d be unable to defend himself. After she gave them that date rape drug, she would definitely be able to gain control of the victims.”
I scanned the document quickly.
“Except there was no sign of any drugs in the systems of the victims,” I pointed out. “They checked that during the autopsies.”
“That’s another thing about these drugs,” Susan said. “They disappear from the body very quickly. As quickly as a few hours. At most, twelve hours from the time the drug is given to the victim. She held all of these men for hours after she took control of them—and the police found them. Starting with spending the night with Walter Issacs’s body in the hotel room. Any date rape drug wouldn’t show up in blood or tissue samples from the autopsies.”
“So you can’t be sure about the date rape drug theory?”
“There was alcohol found in the systems of all of the men,” she said. “And alcohol is the most likely way she would have given the date rape drug to them.”
“Still, that’s not proof. Most guys have a drink when they’re out trying to bed a woman like this.”
“Ah, but there’s something else. Even though the date rape drug leaves the body within a few hours, it does remain longer in the victim’s urine.”
“So do we have any of the victims’ urine?”
“Tim Hammacher.”
I suddenly understood where she was going. “He pissed his pants.”
“That’s right. I asked the lab people to check the urine stains on his underwear, which was still being kept in the evidence storage area. Guess what they found? A trace of Rohypnol, one of the date rape drugs. And Borrell was posing as a shrink. She probably had some knowledge of different kinds of drugs and access to them. It wouldn’t have been hard for her to obtain Rohypnol, drop it into the drinks of her victims once they got back to the hotel room or wherever she did it—and then, when the man lost consciousness, she’d tie him up so he couldn’t get away.”
I looked down again at the computer printouts in front of me. Rohypnol. A date rape drug. Damn.
“I think you’ve done it,” I said.
“We’ve done it.”
“Because we’re a team?”
“Like you said before. Nick and Nora Charles. Hart to Hart. Remington Steele. You and me.”
“You know, I always heard that those couples celebrated finding a break in a big case like this by having wild, passionate sex together.”
“They didn’t have sex on TV or in the movies back then.”
“Well, we would be breaking new ground here then.”
“Give it some time, Gil.”
I handed the computer printout back to her. The open space where her husband’s picture had been was still there. It took away from the otherwise overall impeccable décor of the office. She really needed to do something about that.
“Would you like a four-by-six or an eight-by-ten glossy print?” I asked.
“Of what?”
“Me.”
I pointed to the empty space on her desk.
“I’ll give you a picture of myself to replace the one you used to have there of Duane.”
“Dale.”
“Right, him.”
“Why would I want to stare at a picture of you all day while I’m at work?”
“To bask in the memory of the sensual pleasures we enjoyed in the bedroom the night before.”
Susan sighed.
“Like I said, Gil, let’s just give it all some time.”
Then we went off to tell the cops that we’d figured out how Blonde Ice was able to subdue her victims.
CHAPTER 50
GOD, I hate stakeouts,” Wohlers said. “They’re boring.”
We were sitting in Wohlers’s unmarked police car outside my building. I’d been inside the car with him there for a few hours. I’d had a big day at the office—filing the latest Blonde Ice story, talking about it on TV, and then doing interviews with other media. But, when I got home, I was still revved up from all the adrenaline and didn’t want to just sit up there alone in my apartment. I knew Wohlers was part of the evening-shift stakeout outside my building, so I went down and joined him undercover. Nothing like being part of a police stakeout team for yourself.
Wohlers belched softly. He’d gone out for food twice so far, while I stayed in the car with the rest of the stakeout team. The first time was for a few slices of pizza, and that hadn’t been too bad. But the last time he’d gone to a McDonald’s and brought back a box of cheeseburgers—figuring he and the rest of us could share them. But we ate only a couple, leaving the rest for Wohlers. He’d littered the floor of the car with the yellow burger wrappers. He’d also had too much coffee, which necessitated several bathroom runs.
“Being on a stakeout alone is the worst,” he said. “You can’t get anything to eat. You can’t get anything to drink. You can’t go to the bathroom. You can’t shut your eyes for even a second. You can’t leave your stakeout post for anything. My old partner used to talk about the worst stakeout he was ever on. Watching a house for a murder suspect. After a few hours, he had to go the bathroom. He had only two choices. Go right there in his pants or find a bathroom. He opted for the latter. He’d been sitting in front of that house for seven hours. He was gone for maybe five minute
s, tops. But that was the five minutes when the guy showed up. And he wasn’t there, he missed him.”
“What did he do?”
“He went out and caught the guy.”
“No, I mean what did he do about the blown stakeout?”
“That’s what I mean too. He spent the next forty-eight hours searching everywhere for this guy. Didn’t eat. Didn’t sleep. Finally tracked him down to a motel on the West Side, broke the door down while he was sleeping and got handcuffs on the guy. Brought him back to the precinct. That’s when he finally told everyone what happened on the stakeout. Not before. I remember him telling me, ‘No way I was going back without that guy in custody. No way I was going to live with that for the rest of my career. I didn’t want to be known as the cop who let a suspect get away because he was taking a crap.’ ”
Wohlers reached into the backseat for the empty pizza box. There were still a few crusts and tiny bits of cheese stuck to the cardboard. He eyed them hungrily.
“There’s something wrong here,” I said to him.
“What do you mean?”
“Why would Borrell tell us in advance who she had targeted as her next victim?”
“She made a mistake.”
“She never made that mistake before.”
“Okay, if Borrell didn’t make a mistake telling us you would be her next target, then why did she do it?”
“I don’t know. But it just seems too easy. She tells us who she’s coming after. Me. She never did that before. Why change the pattern? Or did she change the pattern? The pattern of this woman has always been to do the unexpected. Like with Melissa Ross. Or with the doctor, Kate Lyon. And even back when she was a teenager . . . she just walked into the police station and confessed. Why? Because she knew she could escape. It was all part of her plan. So what’s her plan now?”
Wohlers shrugged and scraped some of the cheese off the pizza box and licked it with his finger. He asked me if I wanted any of that or the leftover remains of the crust. I politely declined.
“So what exactly is it that you think is wrong?” he asked me again.
