by R. G. Belsky
I planned to ask her about this and the case against Morelli and other stuff when we met, but she surprised me with a preemptive strike in the conversation that threw me off balance.
“How would you like to come work for me?” she asked as soon as we sat down
“Doing what?”
“I need a new Chad Enright. Well, not actually like Chad. A nicer version. Not to mention one who won’t plot to kill me. But I need a strong number two like that. Someone tough, smart, and used to dealing with crises exploding all the time. You fit the criteria better than anyone I know. What do you think?”
“I already have a job. Running the news operation at Channel 10 isn’t too shabby.”
“This could be a better job for you.”
“You mean more money?”
“I’m not sure about that. Government salaries might not compare to what you’re getting now. But better in terms of a career and a future for you. If I get elected mayor, you’ll be my top person. Maybe the second most powerful person in the city. And who knows what might happen after that. There could be even more high-profile jobs for me, and for you, too, if things work out the way I hope.”
Holy cow, I thought to myself. She was already looking ahead to a political future beyond the mayor’s office. Senator? Governor? Maybe even the White House down the line. And she was offering to let me become a political superstar along with her.
I knew that I would never do it. It wasn’t just about the money. I was a journalist at heart, not a political operative. But I figured it couldn’t hurt to play along like I was interested. Maybe it would help me get some more stories out of her office.
“Does that idea interest you, Clare?”
“It certainly is an intriguing prospect.”
“Then you’ll consider it?”
“Definitely.”
“The News Never Stops” seemed to be succeeding, at least so far.
We used Weddle’s concept to report on a number of stories with live video and streaming and a lot of other stuff that we passed off as actual news coverage. Most important of all, we promoted the “live” concept intensely on air and in other media as well. The ratings had jumped since we started doing all this, so I guess Weddle knew what he was talking about.
Our personal relationship was in the same holding pattern it had been before.
We snuck off together for a few private conversations, even a quick kiss or two. But no, we had not slept together. Not yet. We both realized the career dangers involved here, so we cooled it on the relationship front until his consulting job with Channel 10 was over. Of course, the station might decide to extend his contract, which would be good for the station but bad for my sex life.
Anyway, it wasn’t like I was busy doing anything with anyone else in this area. I’d never heard back from Scott Manning after our meeting, my ex-husband Sam Markham wouldn’t even take my phone calls anymore, and there was no one else breaking down my bedroom door to get in at the moment.
So I’d wait for Weddle.
As long as I had to.
I just hoped it didn’t take too much longer.
Brett and Dani had broken up again. Then they were back together. If that sounds confusing to you, imagine how it is for me.
It turned out that Dani discovered a receipt that showed Brett had bought something expensive for his wife on her birthday. Dani blew up and announced their “engagement” was off. But, before I could bring them into my office to sort it all out in terms of office policy, they were back together again.
Brett explained that the gift was a farewell thank-you to his wife for being such a great mother to their kids, and nothing more. Dani accepted that. Whew! Talk about fast-breaking news. I was having trouble keeping up with the latest on Brett and Dani. I wondered if I could somehow spin the two of them off as a TV reality show. Now that would get us a lot of ratings!
There was another sexual issue with one of the cameramen, a guy named Ted Fleckman who had worked there for a long time.
Cassie O’Neal had come to the office one day wearing a low-cut blouse, and Fleckman made a breast joke in front of her. She filed a formal complaint about his “inappropriate” comment. I suspended Fleckman for two weeks without pay and ordered him to attend sensitivity training classes. I could have fired him, but I took into account his long service to the station.
“Why did you do it?” I asked him.
“It was a joke, Clare.”
“You can’t say things like that in the workplace.”
“It’s an old joke. I’ve said it here in the past. Hell, I think I’ve even said it to you. No one ever got upset before.”
“Times have changed,” I told him. “You need to change, too.”
“So I get suspended for telling a joke I’ve told a lot of times in the past? It was a damn joke. All I was trying to do was get a laugh.”
“It wasn’t that funny a joke anyway,” I told him.
All of this made me even more certain it was the right move for me and Weddle to keep our relationship under wraps as long as we were working together in the newsroom. I was the supervisor responsible for making sure no inappropriate sexual stuff was going on here. It was important for me to make sure everyone understood the rules of sexual behavior—what was acceptable and what was not—in the workplace today.
Even the news director.
“I’ve been thinking that I need to settle down,” I told Janet. “Get married, buy a house in the suburbs, maybe even have a family.”
“Do you have someone in your life to settle down with?”
“Not at the moment.”
“Any prospects?”
“That guy Weddle I told you about.”
“But you said you haven’t even had sex with him yet.”
“Well, there is that …”
“Where would you live in the suburbs?”
“No idea.”
“And the family?”
“What about it?”
“I asked you about this not long ago—are you considering having a baby at your age?”
“No.”
“Then where would the family come from? Adoption?”
“Can’t tell you that either.”
“This idea doesn’t seem like a well-thought-out plan, Clare.”
“I’m still working out some of the details …”
The thing was, the family part was as much on hold as my relationship with Gary Weddle.
I hadn’t gone back to see Lucy in Virginia for a few weeks now, ever since she’d asked me disturbing questions about my interest in her life that I couldn’t answer. Sooner or later, I was going to have to make a decision on Lucy. Either tell her the truth about who I am, her biological mother—or else simply walk away from her forever.
It all might have worked out. The marriage stuff to Weddle. The home in the suburbs. The family with me and Lucy and my granddaughter. But life is a lot like the news cycle—sometimes it hits you with a big breaking surprise development when you least expect it to happen.
Maggie told me that Scott Manning was on the phone for me.
Damn.
Scott Manning—and all the pain and heartbreak and regrets I had about him and our doomed relationship—was the one thing I didn’t need right now.
I decided to make that clear to Manning, once and for all, right at the start of the conversation on the phone.
“Look, I’m sorry about a lot of the things I said and did after you went back to your wife, Scott. But I was jealous and I was angry at you then. Not now. I’m not interested in having a relationship with you anymore. I’ve got someone else. I’m happy with him. So, you’re with your wife, I’m with him—and I don’t plan on ever having any kind of a sexual relationship with you again. I just want to make that clear.”
“That’s all very interesting to know, but it’s not why I called.”
“Huh?”
“I’ve got news for you. About that list of murders you gave me. We just g
ot a DNA match on some of them. Not all yet, but enough to indicate a real pattern. It looks like it was the same person who killed these women, Clare.”
“A serial killer,” I said.
“A serial killer,” he repeated.
PART III
THE WANDERER
CHAPTER 33
LESS THAN AN hour later, I was sitting in Manning’s office at FBI headquarters in Lower Manhattan.
“There are definite DNA matches with five of the names you gave me,” Manning said. “Likely matches in a half dozen more. The others—all except one—came back with varying degrees of DNA confirmation data, making it possible, but not absolutely certain, they were done by the same person.”
“That includes the murders people have already been sent to jail for?”
“Yes.”
“Which means they must be innocent.”
“It looks like that.”
“Jeez!”
“Yeah, it’s gonna be a major legal nightmare. But that’s not my concern. I just want to catch the son of a bitch who’s been doing this for so long. Now that we know he does exist.”
No serial killer—at least none that I could think of—had ever gone undetected for such a sustained period of time without anyone realizing the deadly predator even existed.
Sure, there had been serial killers who worked in anonymity for shorter periods in the past.
A lot of people don’t know this, but David Berkowitz, aka Son of Sam, was shooting and killing people in New York City for months before anyone knew about it. Berkowitz’s spree began with the stabbing of two teenaged girls in 1975. After that, Berkowitz began using a gun—the infamous .44 Bulldog revolver—in a series of attacks against women—and sometimes the men with them—throughout 1976 and into early 1977. But they all seemed like separate, random crimes until police matched up the ballistics in all the slayings to find out they came from the same gun. That’s when the terrifying serial killer who would become Son of Sam exploded into the public consciousness. After that, Son of Sam/David Berkowitz went public with his killings, sending taunting notes to the authorities and media about his victims.
Ted Bundy was able to abduct and murder women in secret at the beginning, too, but authorities eventually connected the pattern and linked the various murders to Bundy after a few years of disappearing women—and bodies found later throughout the Northwest.
No question about it though, “The Wanderer”—that’s what I was calling him, too, now—was a different kind of serial killer. A serial killer who had carried out his deadly spree in secret for three decades while no one even knew he was out there. Until now.
“Which one of the murders was the only one that didn’t have any kind of DNA match?” I asked.
“The first one.”
“Becky Bluso in Indiana.”
“That’s right.”
I was surprised.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “How could Becky Bluso’s murder not be connected to all the rest? The person I got the information about the serial killings from started it all out by looking into the Bluso murder. And it was at the top of the list of victims he put together. It doesn’t make any sense that there’d be no DNA match on her.”
Manning shrugged. “I’m only telling you what the DNA results showed.”
He explained that DNA testing was difficult in such old cases. DNA deteriorated at different rates—depending on a variety of variables—including how it had been stored. In cold cases like this, many of them ignored for years without any arrest, DNA preservation was not a big priority.
“That’s why these cases are less than a perfect DNA match,” he said. “But there’s enough DNA evidence for them to make us believe they are connected. The other five are slam-dunk matches. No question about it. Same person did them. Probably did all of them. Except for Becky Bluso. We got nothing from DNA there.”
“Maybe the DNA match wasn’t there because evidence samples had eroded or whatever after thirty years.”
“Or maybe someone else murdered Bluso, a different killer from whoever did the rest.”
“Then why would her name be at the top of the list of victims?”
“You tell me. You’re the one who came to us with the list.”
He asked me then for more information about how I’d obtained the names. I’d told him some of it in the meeting we’d had in the bar that first night, but he wasn’t that interested in the details then. Now he wanted to know everything.
“Any idea how Barlow came up with the names?” Manning asked when I was finished.
“Only that he was interested in going back to the Bluso girl’s murder—which he had remembered from his days as city editor at the Indiana paper—and that led him to these other dead women.”
“Except the Bluso killing doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the rest of them.”
“As far as we know,” I said.
My mind was racing at a million miles an hour right now. Not only with questions about Bluso and the other dead women. But mostly, how I was going to break this big, blockbuster story. I figured I’d race back to the office, get Maggie and the others to pull together whatever background and old video footage we could find from the other murders, and then I’d report the whole thing myself on the 6 p.m. newscast. Maybe I could even get Manning to go on air with me to talk about these revelations.
But, as it turned out, Manning had other ideas.
“I need you to sit on this story for now and not tell anyone about it,” he told me.
“Are you kidding me? This is a huge story, and I’m the one who discovered it. I came to you, remember? Why wouldn’t I put it on the air tonight?”
“Because right now we know about this serial killer being out there, but he doesn’t know about us. That is, he doesn’t know we know about him. That gives us a big advantage in looking for him. If you air the story, it will jeopardize our investigation. That’s why I’m asking you not to do it.”
“Look, I understand what you’re saying. And I want to be a good citizen and help the FBI and police just like anyone else. But the investigation is your job, not mine. My job is to report the story. And that’s why it’s going on the air on our 6 p.m. newscast tonight.”
“You can’t do that, Clare.”
“How are you going to stop me? I have the same information you have, and you’ve told me now about the DNA matchup results that confirm there’s a serial killer at work. We weren’t off the record or anything when you did that. I’m going with the story.”
“I think there’s a way we can both get what we want out of this.”
“Huh?’
“I have an offer for you.”
“There’s nothing you can offer me that will stop me from airing the story on our newscast tonight.”
“Listen to my offer to you first.”
“There’s no point—”
“Please, Clare.”
“Okay, what’s your offer?”
“I’ll let you inside our investigation.”
CHAPTER 34
I TOLD JACK Faron everything when I got back to the office. Well, almost everything.
“This could be one of the biggest serial killer stories of all time, Jack,” I said after running through the details of my encounter with Scott Manning. “Bigger than Son of Sam, bigger than the Zodiac Killer, bigger maybe even than Ted Bundy. We’re talking about close to twenty potential victims—and there might well be more we don’t know about yet. But we can do even better than report this story; we can own this story. ‘The Wanderer’ will belong to Channel 10—all the way until they finally catch him—if I’m a part of the FBI investigation.”
“Or we could go with the story we have on air tonight,” Faron said. “Break it wide open. We’ll get all the attention; we’ll get big ratings, too. That’s what we’re here for, Clare, to report stories to our viewers. Whatever it is we know at the moment. Our job is not to sit on a big story to meet the demands of law enf
orcement as to when we can run it. I say we put you on the air tonight with whatever you’ve already got.”
“That’s not an option.”
“Why not? You told me the FBI guy confirmed there was a solid DNA match on some of the cases, and likely matches on many of the others. You also said you never went off the record with him on anything he revealed. What’s the problem?”
“I gave him my word we’d hold it.”
“Tell him you changed your mind.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because you can’t tell someone you’re giving them your word, then say you changed your mind about it afterward. That kind of defeats the whole purpose of the ‘I’m giving you my word’ pledge.”
“You shouldn’t have done that without consulting with me first.”
“Let’s give it a try, huh? I’m supposed to go back there tomorrow and meet Manning’s boss to get a fuller briefing on the status of the investigation. We can always revisit the decision after that. All we’d be doing is holding off on the story for a day. But, if I am part of the FBI team going after this guy, we would have the complete story from the inside.”
“Unless someone else breaks it first.”
“No one else knows about this.”
“What if someone from the FBI office leaks it to another media outlet?”
“That won’t happen.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Scott Manning gave me his word,” I said.
“Are you even certain that this guy Manning can pull off something like this? He’s new to the FBI, right? He only left the NYPD last year. He might have said anything he could think of to get you not to air this story, but that doesn’t mean he can back up his promises with the bureau.”
