decent breath, but with every cough and everything I expunged from my aching lungs, I was clearing a pathway for some actual respiration. Once we’d cleaned up, we drove Ziggy to Mass General, parked in the garage, and ten minutes later identified ourselves to the staff working the ICU as the people who pulled the Jane Doe out of the Southie fire. We asked if we could see her for just a moment, if that would be all right with them.
“It’s important for closure,” I said.
If any of the staffers found it odd that Ruby got emotional in this woman’s presence, they didn’t say. Tears in the ICU are a common occurrence, but I bet the staff didn’t often witness one stranger sobbing over the medical plight of another. Of course, they didn’t know this was a daughter holding her mother’s hand.
Winnie was on a ventilator, her arms an octopus of IV drips. All sorts of other machines were attached to her, all humming and beeping away, but I didn’t know their purpose and didn’t think it wise to ask. It might seem odd to take such an interest in Jane Doe’s medical condition. Thanks to HIPAA, we didn’t glean all that much about her prognosis, either. She was suffering from severe smoke inhalation; that much we were told, though it was unclear when—or even if—she would regain consciousness.
I overheard two nurses talking about the toxicology report they were expecting from the lab at any moment. I’m sure when the police read through that report, they’d have some questions for Elliot Uretsky—aka me. How did I manage to hear this woman calling out for help if she had enough drugs swimming in her system to knock out an elephant? Those questions might come up, and if they did, either I’d BS my way through them or I’d make a call to Clegg and ask for a lifeline. Right now I needed to be a rock for Ruby, who sat silent by her mother’s bedside, swallowing down tears as sour to her as the smoke lingering in my lungs.
But of all the stories to make the evening news, Winnie and the two fires in Southie were merely footnotes. We got back to our place a little before five o’clock in the afternoon and parked Ziggy in the reserved spot out back. We entered the apartment building through the back door, which meant we didn’t see any of the action going on out front. I immediately turned on the TV, curious what the reports would have to say about the fire.
That’s when we heard the lead story—the really big news item of the day. It hadn’t been confirmed yet by the police, but there was growing speculation about a possible serial killer on the loose in Boston. According to the somber-sounding newscaster, the body of a mutilated woman had been found inside her Winthrop apartment. Authorities were not releasing the woman’s name pending notification of her family, but they did have some disturbing information about the crime to share with the viewing public.
The woman’s fingers had been severed and placed ritualistically on her body. And some bright reporter with a nose for the news managed to link the gruesome details of the murder victim to a similar act performed on Rhonda Jennings. Somebody read the police reports and matched the modus operandi of the two crimes. Somebody didn’t need a lot more information to connect those terrible dots. Now the race was on between the people trying to control the flow of information and those who wanted to expose the truth. We sat riveted to the news, watching the reporters trying to make sense of it all.
The news people had all their bases covered. One television crew was out in Winthrop, at Jenna’s apartment, one was at the Boston police headquarters, and another was stationed right outside the apartment on Harvard Avenue where Rhonda Jennings once lived. Ruby went over to the window and confirmed at least four news trucks from different television stations parked right outside. Thank goodness we’d come in through the back door, or we would have been accosted like our other neighbors, who were just trying to come home for the night. On the TV, the Channel Seven news anchor was asking the same questions anybody would ask.