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  “That’s what they all said, huh?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Did anyone also happen to mention that if I didn’t have all the facts of a story, I sometimes just made it up?”

  “C’mon, Joe—that happened a long time ago.”

  I figured if I waited him out long enough, he’d eventually get around to the real reason for this phone call.

  “How come you never drop by the office to say hello?” Kramer asked.

  “I was fired. Remember?”

  “Well, sure, but . . .”

  “When you’re fired, it’s kind of a message that the company doesn’t want you around anymore. It’s not exactly a social invitation to keep in touch. I figured I was persona non grata.”

  “You? You’re a friend. We go back a long way, you and me, Joe.”

  I sighed.

  “What do you want from me, Andy?”

  “Do I need a reason to call up an old friend?”

  “Yes.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “My unerring reporter’s instinct.”

  Kramer laughed. “You’re right, Joe. I do need something from you.”

  Then he told me the latest news about Felix the Cat.

  “It’s an easy gig, Joe. You’ll get paid; you’ll get some nice publicity for it, which should be good for your public relations business; and then you can go back to your job there and your house in New Jersey and your pretty new fiancée and live happily ever after. What do you say?”

  “It would be just this one assignment, right?” I said. “I’d go see Felix the Cat in jail, interview him for the Banner, then write up the story—and that would be it.”

  “Absolutely,” Andy Kramer said. “In and out. No problem.”

  “In and out,” I repeated.

  Chapter 4

  Andy said the letter had arrived in the mail three days earlier. It was addressed to “Letters to the Editor, New York Banner”—and came from Ossining State Prison. Inside the envelope was a piece of paper with a typewritten message, written in simplistic verse—just the way Felix the Cat used to send his notes to the media. At first, the Banner editors thought it might be a hoax. But there was a handwritten signature at the bottom, so they checked it out. It was from David Galvin.

  I sat in Andy’s office and read it.

  Dear Editor:

  I’ve been away in prison for eleven long years,

  Now there’s lots of regrets, lots of tears

  It’s finally time to do the right thing,

  Send me a reporter, and I promise to sing

  I know secrets about those old days,

  when I was big news on the front page

  Now I want to tell the truth behind it all,

  the terrible deeds, the blood, and the rage

  You’ve got a newsroom full of reporters,

  but I don’t want anyone new

  Joe Dougherty’s my choice

  He’s the only one that will do.

  Dougherty, Dougherty, he’s my man

  If he can’t save my soul, no one can!

  —David Galvin

  (Felix the Cat)

  “Why me?” I asked Andy after I finished.

  “I don’t have the answer to that.”

  “I mean it doesn’t make sense. Sure, I was working at the Banner during the Felix the Cat murders, but I didn’t have any kind of a big role in it. I didn’t break any exclusives. I didn’t get any personal notes from the killer. I never wrote public appeals for him to turn himself in like some reporters did. I was just one of a very large pack of reporters covering the case.”

  “Your byline was on the story of Galvin’s arrest,” Andy said. “I pulled it from the library.”

  He handed me a story across the desk. I looked down at the clipping.

  FELIX THE CAT CAPTURED!

  cops swoop down

  on killer of nine,

  rescue woman captive

  By Joe Dougherty

  “So what?”

  “Maybe he’s been obsessing about that article—and about you—all these years in prison,” he said. “Pinned it up to the wall of his jail cell—and reads it every day until he thinks you’re his pal or something. I don’t know—the guy’s crazy, man.”

  “On one level, yes. But he’s also very smart. I remember reading somewhere once how he had an IQ of one-sixty-one. I figure there has to be some other reason.”

  “So you’ll ask him when you go to see him. Are you up for this or not, Joe?”

  Before I could answer, an editor came in to run down the day’s front-page stories. The biggest one was about the murder of a wealthy Wall Street investment banker, who had been found shot to death with a pretty young call girl in his Upper East Side apartment a few weeks earlier. Authorities were now zeroing in on a jealous girlfriend as the main suspect—who also happened to be the daughter of one of the city’s most prominent businessmen and political movers and shakers. The story had everything—violence, sex, money, power. It had been in the headlines ever since the shooting happened. There was also a building collapse in Washington Heights, a massive drug bust in Queens, a fiscal crisis at City Hall, and a $36 million winner in the lottery.

  I remembered when I used to live and die with the news like that, each day of my life. Every story, every assignment—they all seemed so important. Now I barely listened to the news. I didn’t care anymore about investment bankers getting murdered or car crashes on the Long Island Expressway or four-alarm fires or shootouts in Times Square or sanitation strikes. I didn’t have time for that stuff anymore. I was all grown up. I had a life now.

  I told that to Andy Kramer.

  “I guess I can understand what you’re saying,” he said. “You’ve been through a lot over the past few years. The mess here at the Banner. Then the way your wife and son died right after that. It looks like you’re finally getting things together again. You don’t want to do anything to mess it up, right?”

  “Something like that.”

  He cleared his throat nervously. “By the way, Joe, I know this is awfully belated—and I’m sorry I never called or dropped you a note at the time—but I was really sorry when I heard about the deaths of Susan and your son . . . what was his name?”

  “Joseph. His name was Joseph, Junior, and he was a year and a half old.”

  Kramer shook his head. “That’s tough.”

  “I survived.”

  And now I was all the way back. I was just about to marry a lovely woman, and soon we would have our own children. Another little boy just like the one I lost—and maybe a daughter too. I’d go to work every day at a real grown-up job, with my own office and normal hours and three-martini lunches—no more living on coffee and junk food and spending hours staking out crime scenes like I used to. Then, at night, I’d go home to our big, beautiful house in the suburbs of New Jersey and enjoy the new life I had for myself.

  All I had to do was say that to Andy Kramer, and tell him to take this job of his and shove it. Then I could leave here and never think about him or the New York Banner or David Galvin again.

  Yep, that was the thing to do, all right.

  Just stand up and walk right out the door.

  “I’ve got a city room full of reporters out there, Joe,” Andy said. “Most of them are eager, ambitious young guns—just like you used to be—who would love to do this interview. But Felix the Cat asked for you in the letter. So do you want to do the story or not?”

  “Yeah, I want to do the story,” I heard myself say.

  Raymond Chandler said it best a long time ago: There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself.

  Chapter 5

  David Galvin had changed a lot in eleven years.

  The last time I’d seen him was on the day of his sentencing. He was a dark, good-looking youth of twenty-two then, with a smug, arrogant look on his face. Even as he was leaving the courthouse after the judge gave him a life sentence, with no possibilit
y of parole, he proudly flashed a thumbs-up sign to the press and curious onlookers outside. There was never a hint of remorse for the unspeakable atrocities he had committed.

  But now he looked like he’d aged thirty years.

  He was thin and emaciated, his hair was mostly gone and his eyes had that vacant, hopeless look that people have when they know they’re going to die.

  Despite his condition, Galvin was still kept restrained by heavy wrist and ankle cuffs that were attached to his hospital bed—just like the woman at the front gate had said. A guard was posted outside the door, only a few feet away from me. Every five minutes, he looked in to see what Galvin was doing. Even in death, this man was going to suffer the indignities of being deprived of even the smallest of life’s freedoms.

  Just like his victims had.

  Above Galvin’s bed was a portrait of Jesus and the Twelve Disciples at the Last Supper. On the table next to him was a Bible. I remembered reading somewhere how he had become religious after being diagnosed with cancer a year earlier. He said he prayed to the Lord every day now for forgiveness for the things he had done. All he wanted now was to go to heaven.

  “Hello, Galvin,” I said. “I’m Joe Dougherty. From the New York Banner.”

  He turned on his side in the hospital bed and looked across the room at me.

  “They really did send you.”

  “That was what you asked for.”

  “I didn’t think they would. I didn’t know if they could find you. I wasn’t even sure you were still alive.”

  “I sometimes wondered about that myself.”

  “Yeah, me too. I wake up every morning now and thank the Lord I still have one more day where I can draw a breath. It’s funny how precious all the little things are that we used to just take for granted. Do you know what I’m saying, Joe?”

  I pulled up a chair and sat down next to the bed. I took out a notebook and pen and set my tape recorder on the table next to the Bible. I was nervous. I wasn’t sure exactly what to say to him next. Or how to get the interview started. It had been a long time since I’d done anything like this.

  “So how are you doing?” I asked him. “Hanging in there?”

  When in doubt, go for the cliche.

  “As well as can be expected. I’ve got cancer. The worst kind too. It started in the colon, then it spread to my liver and my pancreas. They figure it’s probably in the bone marrow, lungs, and even my brain by now too. Or if it isn’t, it’s headed there very soon. I’m fucked, my man. Totally fucked.”

  “I’m sorry—I guess,” I said. “I really don’t know what to say, except . . .”

  “Except no one’s going to mourn me very much when I’m gone, huh?”

  I nodded. “You did a lot of bad stuff.”

  “That I did.”

  I looked around the room. At the picture of Jesus on the wall. The Bible next to his bed. There was even a copy of the Twenty-third Psalm pinned to the wall next to him. “Yea, though I walk through the Valley of Death, I fear no evil . . .”

  “So now you’ve decided to make peace with God, huh? Say ‘I’m sorry’ and hope all is forgiven. March right up to the heavenly gates with your head held high, just like you were a normal human being. Instead of a murdering son of a bitch.”

  “God is all forgiving,” Galvin said. “The scriptures tell us this.”

  “Well, if he really is, then you’re going to be the ultimate test of that theory.”

  He smiled weakly.

  “What am I doing here, Galvin?” I asked. “I haven’t been a reporter at the Banner for eight years. I haven’t even worked for any kind of a newspaper for awhile. Why did you ask for me?”

  “It’s not important,” he said.

  “Yes, it is,” I said to him. “I need to know why.”

  “You’ll find out.” Galvin smiled weakly. “Soon enough.”

  He looked down at the tape recorder next to him.

  “You better make sure that thing’s on,” he said. “I don’t have much time. I fall asleep a lot. And, if I don’t, the drugs for the cancer make me hallucinate and lose concentration. But I have to take them. It’s the only way I can stand the pain. So let’s just get going. Dougherty. I have a story to tell.”

  He told it then. The whole thing, from the first murder to the last. He recounted the details of the killings, the terror his victims felt, the pleasure he got from his acts. He talked about the dead ones. The two who lived too. The one that was with him when he was captured. And another victim a few months earlier that police had found barely alive. The cops had come very close to catching him that time, Galvin remembered. He said he wanted to contact the woman now—to tell her how sorry he was for what he’d done to her—but the prison officials wouldn’t let him.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “She couldn’t have heard you anyway.”

  I remembered the woman lying in the hospital after the police found her. The way she looked. The fear in her eyes. The way she cringed in terror when anyone, even the nurses, touched her. It never got any better either. They say she just retreated into her own private little world. A world far away from terrible people like David Galvin. But far away from the rest of us too. The doctors didn’t think she’d ever recover her sanity.

  “That’s too bad,” Galvin said when I told him about her.

  I wasn’t sure if he meant it was too bad about her problems or too bad he’d never had a chance to finish the job of killing her.

  “So what’s the point of all this?” I asked. “Now that you’re dying, you suddenly feel compassion for all your victims? And you want to say you’re sorry?”

  “Yes, I’m sorry.”

  It reminded me of an old Steve Martin comedy routine. One he used to do on “Saturday Night Live.” Whatever the trouble, Martin used to tell the audience, there’s two magic little words that can make everything all right again: “I forgot.” I forgot to pay my taxes. I forgot I was married to you when you caught me in bed with that other woman. Gee, judge, I forgot armed robbery was supposed to be a crime.

  And now David Galvin was saying “I’m sorry”—I just forgot murdering innocent young women was wrong.

  “And that’s it?” I asked him impatiently.

  “No, there’s more.”

  “What is it?”

  “There’s more,” he repeated.

  I stared at him. For a few seconds I didn’t get what he was telling me. Then it suddenly hit me.

  “More victims?” I asked.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “More than the nine dead people we already know about?”

  “We were very busy.”

  “And that’s what you called me here to confess?”

  “I had to tell someone before it’s too late.”

  I tried to let the enormity of what he was saying sink in. More victims. For eleven years, we’d known that David Galvin—the man who called himself Felix the Cat—was a monster. But we thought we knew the boundary lines of his evil. Now—in his dying moments—he was telling me that it was even worse than we had ever imagined.

  There was something else bothering me too.

  He’d said we.

  We were very busy.

  “What do you mean ‘we,’” I asked. “You and the cops. You and the press. I don’t understand.”

  “We murderers,” he said.

  That’s when I realized what he really wanted to confess to me before he died.

  “I didn’t do it alone, Joe,” he said.

  Chapter 6

  “We called ourselves the Great Pretenders,” David Galvin said. “There were four of us. All students at New York University. All from good families, well-to-do backgrounds, excellent grades. The best and the brightest. The stuff the American dream is supposed to be made of. Only I guess we became the American nightmare.”

  Then he told me about the games.

  The fantasy games.

  “In the beginning,” he said, “that’s all we were doing. Playin
g a game. But it turned into much more than that. It became our lives. I guess you’d say things got out of hand.”

  He told me about games with names like Dungeons and Dragons, Goth, and Realm of the Gods. I’d heard about them before. They’d been a hot fad at high schools and colleges for years—turning campus geeks into imaginary netherworld heroes with extraordinary powers.

  The players in these kinds of games took on alter egos. They then became that person, living in their fantasy world for hours—as mythical gods whose powers were enhanced by cutting off people’s heads or killing their opponents or otherwise spilling someone’s blood.

  All this emphasis on violence worried some people. Critics warned that kids became so obsessed with the games that they lost touch with reality. Others called them a satanic tool. And fantasy games had even been linked to a number of teen suicides and other violence.

  But, to most people, it was all just a game.

  That’s what I thought too.

  Until David Galvin told his story.

  “Looking back on it all now, if I had to come up with a reason for what happened—well, I guess it would be boredom,” Galvin said. “All four of us were looking for excitement. Thrills. The ultimate high. We were the first group of students who grew up in the MTV generation, and we craved instant gratification.

  “Oh, we tried all the usual things—sex, drugs, drinking. But it was never enough. Everyone else had already done those things. We wanted to do something new. Something bold, something dangerous, something so mind-boggling that the world would sit up and take notice of us. Like Captain Kirk used to say on ‘Star Trek,’ we wanted to go boldly where no one had ever gone before.

  “I don’t remember exactly how it started. I think it was late at night, and we were all sitting around somewhere—maybe in one of the dorms, maybe in a bar, maybe even on the grass at Washington Square Park under the moonlight. And we started talking about killing.

  “At first it was still a fantasy kind of thing—you know, like slaying a dragon or your opponent on the field of battle in some mythical kingdom. We were just playing the game. Like we always did.