The license listed an address in Lexington, a wealthy suburb about a dozen miles northwest of Boston. I ran back to the phone, dialed information, and asked for a Lauren Hutchens in Lexington.
I went through that whole computerized rigmarole that usually means there is nobody by that name, and then a woman got on the line and told me I was out of luck.
“Any Hutchenses in Lexington,” I asked, trying not to sound breathless, though I was of the mind that time had suddenly become crucial.
“I have one, a Walter Hutchens on Dome Road,” she said.
I told her I’d take it, and dialed it as quickly as my fingers would allow.
Come about the fifth ring, the sleepy voice of a woman said, “Hello.” It was then I realized how early in the morning this was. Didn’t matter. I asked for Lauren. The woman hesitated and said, “She doesn’t live here.”
“Any idea how I might get in contact with her?” I asked.
“This is her mother. She moved into Boston last year. Can I help you with something?”
My heart sank. The truth was not a viable option, not the whole truth, anyway. I said, “This is Jack Flynn, a reporter for the Boston Record. I’m trying to speak with Lauren about a story I’m writing.”
A long silence, long to me anyway. I wondered if she was about to tell me that her daughter was dead, the victim of a murderer who hadn’t yet been caught. Instead she said, still sleepy, “She moved into town a year ago.”
“Do you have her number?” I asked, trying to sound neither pushy nor panicked.
“I can call her and pass along your information.”
Everyone’s suspicious of the news media these days.
I gave her my cell phone and work numbers and asked if she could call sooner rather than later. And with that, I hung up.
I dialed information again, this time asking for a Lauren Hutchens in Boston. There was an L. Hutchens on Park Drive, and I called that number but got no answer. When it kicked over to a recorded greeting, the woman’s voice, strong and resonant, sounded like it would go with the picture that I held in my hand. I asked her to call me and gave her my numbers. I had something more than a feeling that she’d never have the chance.
7
Peter Martin and Vinny Mongillo were already sitting in Martin’s corner office as I made my way through the darkened, empty newsroom, the Phantom Fiend’s envelope in my hand, a little bit of dread in my heart — and maybe a tinge of embarrassment and a bit of excitement over the story that was beginning to unfold.
The two of them were sitting at a small, square conference table when I walked in, Mongillo taking the last bite of a Krispy Kreme doughnut that he had pulled from a half-empty box that sat between them. Truth be told, Mongillo had lost about seventy-five pounds in the prior year and was continuing to lose weight the way Frank Sinatra shed wives, until Krispy Kreme opened its first store in Boston proper. The board of directors of Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, Inc., must set aside ten minutes at their annual meetings just to pay homage to Vinny Mongillo.
Martin pointed to the chair to his right, in an apparent invitation, though maybe it was a command. I don’t know. As I sat, he said to me, “I woke up with a jolt last night. I had this thought that you may not be the only reporter in town that the Phantom Fiend is corresponding with. And if you’re not, someone else might get this story into print before us.”
He had a point, as he often does, even if it seemed needless to make it at 6:30 a.m. I was already becoming proprietary about the Phantom Fiend. Yes, he may have been a killer, but he was my killer, and I’d just as soon keep it that way.
Mongillo coughed hard. I thought I saw a piece of chewed doughnut land on the table in front of me, but didn’t want to inspect it too closely for fear that I was right. I asked Martin, “What makes you think that?”
“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.”