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 hall 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.
So livid that he pounded his fist on the desk, then picked up a pile of papers and tossed them on the floor beside him. His face was beet red, his eyes contorted. Normally a handsome man with silvery hair and a fit frame, he looked like a tired, angry pensioner who had just found out that his Social Security COLA was frozen in the halls of Congress.
Harrison had personally called me the moment I got back to my desk from the Lauren Hutchens murder scene, saying he needed to see me, Mongillo, and preferably the editor of the paper on an urgent matter. I thought he might be prepared to confide information in this investigation. Apparently I thought wrong.
“No sir,” I replied. “We didn’t ask for these letters. We didn’t seek them out. As soon as we received them, we not only alerted your detectives, but we handed over the original copies —”
“As soon as you received them? As soon as you fucking received them?” That was the commissioner again, his voice rising to a whole new level of anger. “When my men arrived at the fucking murder scene this morning, the two of you were already standing outside the fucking door. And you’re saying you called us as soon as you received them.”