Strangled

by Brian McGrory

  “Wichita,” he replied. “The BTK serial killer back in the seventies and eighties. He sent a letter to the local paper that mistakenly got routed to the classified ad department. He was so frustrated that his name didn’t get into print that he started writing to TV reporters, radio reporters, the cops. Anyone with a fricking PO box. They lost control of the story. I don’t want that to happen here.”

  I nodded. Mongillo tried to speak for the first time since I arrived, but his voice was choked by the doughnut that he was coughing up. He began coughing again.

  I ignored him and pushed the envelope toward Martin. “We’ve heard from him again,” I said.

  Martin’s eyes shone bright, the same look Mongillo tends to get when you place a nicely seasoned cut of prime rib before him. He tenderly — almost lovingly — fingered the envelope and pulled out the note and driver’s license inside. I worried for a moment about contaminating potential fingerprints, but then thought that surely this killer wasn’t moronic enough not to wear gloves.

  Martin stared at them both in silence. Finally, he looked up and asked me, “Is Lauren Hutchens dead?”

  I brought him up to date on my phone calls and concluded, “I don’t know.”

  Meantime, Mongillo was hacking and wheezing and making various guttural noises that are rarely heard beyond the hog lots of Iowa. Finally, thankfully, he stood up and left the room. Martin never even gave him a look.

  In Vinny’s absence, Martin asked, “Do we knock on her door or do we call the police?”

  An excellent question, one that I had contemplated on my drive into work. The safe thing to do, the responsible thing to do, would have been to call Mac Foley and tell him I was holding the driver’s license of a young woman, courtesy of the same person who sent me Jill Dawson’s license. The one problem with that scenario was that once I made that call, I would effectively lose control over the story. Foley wasn’t of the mind to play much ball with the Record, not yet anyway.

  But equally problematic was the question of how the paper would benefit if I knocked on Hutchens’s door. What could I possibly discover that might outweigh the possibility of somehow fouling valuable evidence?

  “I think we have to call the police immediately,” I said.

  At that moment, Mongillo walked back into the room, a tissue in his hand and his eyes rimmed with red from his coughing fit. He sat down dramatically, turned to me, and said, “Can I see those notes he sent you?”

  I slid him the most recent one and pulled a photocopy of the first note from a notebook in front of me. Mongillo read them over in silence. He made a motion with his hand, and Martin handed him Lauren Hutchens’s license.

  Finally, he looked up at me.

  “You know who the Phantom Fiend is, right?”

  I shook my head and replied, “I’ve been trying to find that out for twenty-four hours, but the library has nothing on him.”

  Mongillo looked from me to Martin and back to me. “It’s the Boston Strangler.”

  The Boston Strangler? My mind began racing like a Chin-coteague pony. The most famous serial killer in United States history — though Son of Sam might have an issue with that. He inspired fear, then books, then a major motion picture starring Tony Curtis. Though I knew very little about him, I did know this: He would slip into women’s apartments all around town and in the suburbs. He would strangle them with some sort of ligature. He would occasionally leave bows around their necks. And he was gone.

  Before either me or Martin could reply, Mongillo added, “The news media back then first dubbed the Boston Strangler as the Phantom Fiend. That’s what he was most commonly called at the time. It was later in the murder spree, with all the hype, that his nickname was changed.”

  That might well be true, but I also knew something else about the Boston Strangler, or at least I thought I did: He was dead, the victim of a murderer in Walpole State Prison sometime in the early 1970s. Best as I could remember, no one was ever charged.

  Which is what I told Vinny. Specifically, I said, “The Boston Strangler was killed, wasn’t he? I mean, he’s dead.”

  Mongillo looked back at me and held my gaze.

  “No,” he said, slowly, firmly, and decisively. “Albert DeSalvo was killed. That’s who you think was the Boston Strangler. That’s who the public was told was the Boston Strangler. But if you ask almost any good cop who was in the area around that time, they’ll tell you that DeSalvo was definitely not the Boston Strangler. The Strangler was never caught. He’s still out there somewhere.”

  He paused here, staring at some distant point, or more likely at nothing at all. I cast a glance toward Martin. Normally, even famously pale, he now looked even whiter than usual. He was staring at Mongillo, his thoughts all but bursting out his eyes and ears.

  Mongillo said, “Now he’s killing more women. He wants you to write about it. And we’ve got to get to Lauren Hutchens’s place to check it out.”

  We pulled up in front of Lauren Hutchens’s address on Park Drive in the Fenway section of Boston. Fenway Park, by the way, is named for the neighborhood, not the other way around, and Park Drive is named for the Fenway, which is a park, though not Fenway Park. This explanation could probably go on all day, like the fact that South Boston and the South End are two different neighborhoods, and Roxbury and West Roxbury are nowhere near each other. Or that the West End doesn’t actually exist. It’s a Boston thing. You live in town, you don’t think anything of it.

  Lauren lived — and possibly died — in a tan-colored cinder-block apartment building that stood seven stories tall, and in stark contrast to the ancient Federalist-style brick town houses all around it. This had obviously been built in the 1950s, as architectural taste had taken a decade-long hiatus while the nation had better things to think about, like family cookouts, the GI Bill, and drinking enough whole milk.

  I pulled my Honda to the curb and pulled out my cell phone. “You think I should call the cops now?” I asked Mongillo.

  The plan was that we were going to position ourselves as close to Lauren Hutchens’s apartment as humanly possible, call the police with the information about the note and the driver’s license, then hopefully get a firsthand view of what had happened inside.

  “Hold off for just another minute,” Mongillo said, taking a long sip of his coffee, which he had insisted on stopping for on the way over. He first insisted on stopping at Starbucks, until I pointed out that a woman’s life was potentially hanging in the balance while he waited the requisite twenty minutes for some barrister, or whatever they call themselves, with a nose ring and an art history degree to handcraft his venti, no-foam, whole-milk caramel latte. He agreed to a compromise: Dunkin’ Donuts. Henry Kissinger wasn’t as good at bringing people together as I am.

  We stepped out of the car onto the sun-splashed curb on a still chilly March morning. Across the street, the Fenway — the park, not the baseball field — sprawled bare and brown as far as the eye could see, a lonely place until the April rains and the May warmth would bring this city to life again.

  “We have an apartment number?” Mongillo asked, looking up at the building.

  “We don’t,” I replied, striding now toward the glass front doors. Inside, we looked on the row of mailboxes with names written and typed in mismatched hands and scripts, until I found “L Hutchens,” neatly scrawled in a black pen. There was no apartment number. We rang the buzzer.

  I’m not sure what I expected to happen. Probably nothing. But my stomach tightened as we waited what felt like forever for her voice to come over the intercom, asking who was at the front door. Or maybe she thought she knew her visitor and she’d just buzz us inside. But neither happened. The only sounds in that vestibule were Mongillo’s labored breathing and his occasional slurps of coffee.

  Another minute elapsed, and Mongillo pressed the button again. I could hear his cell phone vibrating inside his coat, but he ignored it. Still nothing. I looked at the face of my own cell phone and saw that it was 7:
32 a.m. Maybe she had left for work already. Maybe she was in the shower and couldn’t hear the alert. Or maybe she was dead.

  A minute later, it was my turn to buzz. Truth be told, neither Mongillo nor I knew what else to do. The plan was to call the police, but we also realized that standing here in the lobby, the cops would come, they’d deny us access to the building, and we wouldn’t see anything of the woman’s apartment, including the woman herself. The only thing we’d end up seeing would be several state workers wheeling her body into the coroner’s van. This was not a good way to start the day — not for me, but especially not for Lauren Hutchens.

  “Fuck it,” I said to Mongillo, resigned. “I’ll call Mac Foley now. This isn’t doing anyone any good.”

  Before he could answer, a twentysomething guy in a wool ski hat wearing a knapsack slammed open the glass doors from inside the apartment building and continued through the second set of doors outside — obviously a grad student of some sort on his way to one of the nearby universities. As I placed my foot inside the closing door, Mongillo called out to the guy, “Any idea what apartment Lauren Hutchens is in?” It was a Hail Mary question, but sometimes these things pan out.

  Without stopping, he turned back and called out, “She’s my neighbor, dude. She’s in 416.”

  We were in business. Of course, what kind of business, I didn’t know. We took the elevator to the fourth floor. We scouted out Apartment 416. I looked at Mongillo, standing there in the same durable tan pants he always wore, with a plaid hunting jacket wrapped around his enormous frame. He looked at me. His cell phone was vibrating again, but much to his uncharacteristic credit, he continued to ignore it.

  There was no doorbell, so I knocked. Mongillo pressed his ear to the door to listen, but apparently heard nothing. Was she alive? Would a fresh-faced woman named Lauren suddenly appear at the door? If she did, what would we say? Or were we standing just a few feet from a horrendous crime scene that the criminal wanted me to know about first?

  A minute or so passed and I knocked again. An older woman in the kind of cloth coat that Richard Nixon’s wife once wore appeared out of a nearby apartment. She gave us a suspicious look as she walked past us toward the elevators, but said nothing.

  I tried the knob and it was locked. I stepped away from the door, pulled my cell from my coat, and said, “I’m calling.” I was surprised at how breathless I had become. Mongillo nodded. I dialed the number to the Boston PD’s homicide bureau and asked for Detective Mac Foley.

  Last I saw Foley was the night before, first when he was pleasantly chatting with me, then when he was eyeing me from across the room, pointing me out to another cop. I didn’t for a second think he appreciated my unintended involvement in the Jill Dawson investigation, and he certainly wouldn’t appreciate my new found role in the Lauren Hutchens case — if, in fact, there was a Lauren Hutchens case. Most of me hoped there wasn’t. Of course, I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that some embarrassing little granule deep inside my head was excited about it all, but I tried to splash the cold water of human compassion on it.

  I was told by the receptionist that Foley wasn’t available, which didn’t surprise me. Mac Foley, as I’ve said, works under the radar of public interest, even as he’s working in the public interest. Truth was, he probably also wasn’t in yet at this hour. I said, “Would it be possible to page him and let him know that Jack Flynn called. I’ve received more correspondence that may be of an urgent nature.” I left my cell phone number.

  Two minutes later, as Mongillo and I lurked in the dimly lit hallway outside of Lauren Hutchens’s door, my phone rang with Detective Mac Foley on the other end of the line. I got not one second of pleasantry — no top of the morning, no how are you, no nice to meet you from the night before. This was definitely the second version of Mac Foley.

  “What do you have?” he asked abruptly. Same words as Martin always uses, in the same clipped manner.

  I said, “Someone slipped an envelope under my apartment door that I found this morning. Inside, a one-line note said, ‘Back again. More women will die,’ in the same typeface, with the same signature as before. It contained the driver’s license of a woman by the name of Lauren Hutchens. Phone listings have her at 558 Park Drive. I’ve tried to reach her, but with no success.”

  Just the facts, ma’am. I was only trying to do my job, and maybe save a woman’s life, though increasingly, I doubted the latter was possible. I don’t believe in the supernatural. I really don’t. But I could almost feel her on the other side of that door, and the feeling I had wasn’t of her moving about.

  After what I thought was a pretty good summation of the situation, I heard silence in response — continued silence from inside the apartment, new silence now from Detective Foley. In a job that relies on people telling me things, silence spells trouble. He finally said, “We’ll check it out.” He paused, then added, “After we do, I need to see you today, face-to-face, with that envelope in hand. Don’t mess it up by letting multiple people touch it. If you think you’re going to turn a murder investigation into a fucking media circus, then you need to learn a lesson or two on how we’re going to operate here.” He hung up the phone without so much as a good-bye.

  Mongillo had leaned close to hear both sides of the conversation. I ended up with a craving for pepperoni out of the deal. We both leaned against the hallway wall in silence, though what we were waiting for, I couldn’t actually say.

  Within about thirty seconds, we heard the faint sound of a siren. Then louder, and louder still. Then we heard something else: a soft tap, followed by a slightly louder bang — coming from the other side of the apartment door. If my heart had been beating any harder, I could have been cited on some sort of noise ordinance violation.

  Mongillo looked at me. I looked at Mongillo. I lunged toward the door and banged on it again, saying firmly and authoritatively, “Police on the way. Open up. Now.”

  Nothing. Nothing but silence. The siren by now was blaring outside the building, stagnant. Mongillo said, “I’m going downstairs to let them in.” He hustled to the elevator, oddly graceful in motion for a man his size, and I stood watch over the door, having no idea if it might open, and if it did, what lurked within.

  Was she alive? Was she dead? If the latter, was her killer still here?

  Before any of these questions could be answered, four cops — two in plain clothes, two in uniform — burst into the hallway, having just stepped off the elevator before Mongillo even reached them.

  One of them said, “Hey, Vinny, what’s shaking?”

  Mongillo said, “For the moment, Woody, just me.”

  They rushed down toward yours truly. I pointed at the door and said, probably needlessly, “It’s locked.”

  One of the uniformed guys said, “There’s a property manager’s office in the basement. I’ll check for a key.”

  “We’ve heard some noises coming from inside,” I said.

  The other uniformed officer said, “Fuck it. Stand back.” He let forth with a ferocious kick just above the knob.

  The door exploded open in a haze of splinters and noise. The first sensation I had was that of cold air gushing into the hallway from an open window inside. The second sensation I had was an impulse to vomit. Sitting in a chair angled directly at the door from the middle of the living room was the body of a young woman. She was wearing a nightshirt that was hoisted up around her waist and torn by her chest. She had dried blood around her eyes and on her upper lip beneath her nose. Her legs were splayed far apart. A ligature, which looked to be an electrical cord, was wrapped around her neck and dangled off to one side. And right beneath her chin, a big looping red bow hung toward the other side.

  The six of us — two plainclothes cops, two uniformed officers, two reporters — stared inside in collective shock. The bottom of a blind slapped against the corner of an open window — the source of the sound that Mongillo and I had recently heard. At that moment, a figure stepped off the elevator down the h
all and shouted out, “Get those fucking reporters away from a potential crime scene.” It was Mac Foley. I wanted to tell him that there was nothing potential about this scene anymore.

  Instead I whispered to Mongillo, “Take detailed mental notes.” One of the detectives, having just regained his wits, yanked the door shut.

  Mongillo said to me, “This, my friend, is the work of your new pen pal. God save Boston when it hears what’s in our midst.”

  Foley, close now, snapped at one of the uniforms, “Escort these guys out of here.” Which the patrolman did, almost apologetically. And that was it. God save this city indeed.

  8

  The police commissioner’s office looked like it was decorated by a Hollywood set designer — what with the grouping of flags behind a sprawling oak desk, heavy blue curtains, a rich burgundy rug, glass cases filled with Boston Police Department memorabilia, a wall of photographs interspersed with old badges and framed letters of commendation.

  I bring this up only because this is where I happened to be sitting a little before noon. Hal Harrison was reclining in a leather swivel chair behind that aforementioned oak desk. Vinny Mongillo sat to my left on the visitor’s side of the desk, and Peter Martin, editor of the Boston Record, was to my right. It’s probably worth noting that I don’t think I had ever seen Martin in public when he wasn’t sitting at a restaurant table and I was paying for the meal. Smart as he is within the confines of the newsroom, a man of the people he is not.

  “You think this is some sort of fucking publicity stunt — another ploy to sell your goddamned paper? That’s what you think?”

  That was Commissioner Harrison, who had lost all of the confiding charm he had displayed from the podium at his retirement speech the night before. On this day, in the privacy of his office, I’d have to say he was absolutely livid.