Chapter 90
I’m sitting out on the balcony of our new apartment, watching the sunset.
It’s been six months, and we’re trying to put our lives back together.
We moved out of the Glendale, of course.
And not just because of what happened to us there, but also because everyone else in the building is currently in a jail cell.
Except for Catherine, who was already dead when the paramedics arrived.
Kalina pulled through despite losing a lot of blood.
She spent a week in the hospital and then joined her co-conspirators in jail.
The whole group face murder charges in the deaths of the three previous occupants of our apartment.
They’re facing other charges, too, for their treatment of me.
False imprisonment, assault, and attempted murder, for starters.
We haven’t recovered the deposit we put down on the place, but we have retained a top-notch law firm.
They’re confident we’ll get it all back and a whole lot more after the civil suit we filed against the residents of the Glendale, in partnership with Mark McGlocklin’s widow and the families of the other victims, goes to trial.
In the meantime, we’re back in Jamaica Plain, thanks to a loan from my parents.
Because after everything that’s happened, taking a loan from them didn’t seem so bad.
And then there’s Sam. Our relationship is better than ever, and he’s even forgiven me for accusing him of cheating and then kicking him out, because, well, that’s just who he is.
My father isn’t consulting on criminal cases anymore.
In fact, he’s thinking of selling the practice altogether and taking early retirement.
He’s only talked about Munson once since the events at the Glendale, because he thought I should know the whole story of the man who started the chain of events that almost got me killed.
Fifteen years ago, Munson was a young doctor doing his residency at Mass General.
But he was so much more. A depraved killer who believed he was entering into relationships with young women who had no idea he was stalking them—at least, not until it was too late.
He suffered from what my dad called a “fantasy-prone personality,” among other things.
Munson struggled to differentiate fiction from reality, and once a thought entered his head, it didn’t take much to create a false memory.
He truly believed that the women who became the objects of his affection were willing participants, even as he killed them—or, in the case of Kalina’s brother, killed to protect them.
Thankfully, Catherine and Ron’s daughter Luna was his last victim.
He slipped up and left a partial thumbprint on a handle of the Glendale’s lobby doors.
He was so careful otherwise, but the police speculated that for whatever reason, he must have peeled his gloves off while walking back through the lobby after killing her.
After that, it didn’t take much to link the partial to a set of fingerprints taken during the mandatory background check all new doctors undergo before getting their license to practice.
And when the police discovered that not only did he match the appearance of a man captured several times on CCTV following victims (including Luna) as they rode the subway, but that he was off work every time a murder took place, they swooped in and arrested him.
The one thing that struck me more than anything with my father’s story was that both Munson and Burgess worked as physicians at the same hospital around the same time.
Apparently, Munson became fixated with Burgess’s fiancée, Emma Cerruto, after seeing her at a Christmas party thrown by one of the other doctors.
When I wondered aloud why Munson hadn’t killed Burgess the way he had Kalina’s brother, my dad said that he wasn’t sure, except that Munson might have felt it would be too suspicious, because they were colleagues.
After that, he clammed up and has said nothing on the subject since.
But I can tell that his guilt over the consequences of his work all those years ago weighs heavily upon him.
He was devastated when he discovered what the residents of the Glendale had done, the lives they had taken in their twisted thirst for revenge.
It almost cost the life of his daughter, and I’m not sure he’ll ever forgive himself for putting me in that danger, even though he did nothing wrong.
Philip Arthur Munson was a monster, for sure, but my dad did his job without prejudice and maintains that he made the right diagnosis, even if he wishes he had never gotten involved with the Back Bay Butcher.
But at least the families of those killed in the Glendale will get some closure, because Ron, Kalina, and the rest of their little band of murderers confessed to killing Jacqueline Burke, Mark McGlocklin, and a third victim, Sandra Prince.
They even led the authorities to a local reservoir where they’d dumped Jacqueline’s body, because she didn’t go missing on her way home from a night out.
They disabled the camera covering the Glendale’s front doors and waited in her apartment—the same apartment that would become ours many years later—and killed her.
“Hey.” Sam appears with a wine in one hand and a glass of chocolate milk in the other.
I’m off wine for the moment . . . too many bad memories.
But even if I weren’t, drinking isn’t an option right now, because the two of us will soon be three, which is about the only good thing to come from our time at the Glendale.
Even better, our doctor assured us that a miscarriage like the one I previously suffered, so late in the second trimester, is rare, and the odds of a second one are incredibly low.
But I was still a nervous wreck until we got to the third trimester, and past the time where we lost the last baby.
We’re still nervous—that won’t change until I’m holding our beautiful child in my arms—but we are also looking forward to welcoming our son.
I take the glass of milk. “I got a call from Detective Meadows this afternoon. The DA is considering another first-degree attempted murder charge because I was pregnant when Kalina and the others tried to kill me.”
“Barely.” Sam flops down into a chair.
“That doesn’t matter.” I was only a few weeks along when the residents of the Glendale made their move.
We only discovered I was pregnant afterward at the hospital.
It was a surprise, because we weren’t trying, although we weren’t not trying, either.
When I think back to the copious amounts of wine they made me drink that night, and the drugs Dr. Burgess shot me up with, I realize how lucky we are.
Catherine and her cohorts could easily have cost us so much more than they did.
Thoughts of our impending new arrival also remind me of the incident in the basement.
The cage door that locked itself and the noises I heard in the darkness.
That bumblebee toy in the crib that appeared to move on its own.
How did Catherine and her cronies pull that off?
A removable panel in the cage? A hidden entrance?
And how did they rig the latch on the cage door to lock itself?
I have no answer to any of those questions and maybe I never will, but it doesn’t matter, because somehow, someway, it was them, pushing my buttons.
“After all this time, I still can’t believe we were so totally duped,” Sam says, breaking my train of thought.
“Me more than you.”
“Nah. I fell for Kalina’s bull about the Wainwright Building. I should have seen what was going on.”
“It wasn’t bull,” I tell him, because she really did own it.
Or at least, she was CEO of the shell company that did.
But the truth is more complex, because Catherine’s family didn’t just own the Glendale; they also owned several other buildings in Boston through a holding company, thanks to her great-grandfather’s real estate dealings.
One of those was the Wainwright, the renovation of which really has been mired in red tape for at least a decade.
All she had to do was create a nested shell company for that building and install Kalina as its head, and voilà.
It would look like Kalina, not Catherine, owned the Wainwright.
It was the perfect trap for Sam, given his occupation. And it worked.
Sam grins. “Well, it doesn’t matter, because when this lawsuit is settled, it might be us who owns the Wainwright. Then I can really get to work on making all that red tape go away, and you’ll have your pick of apartments.”
I almost choke on my milk. “Absolutely not.” We’re in a good place right now.
Our relationship is stronger than ever, and I intend to keep it that way.
We even got married a few weeks after I was released from the hospital—just a small ceremony with close family and friends.
Living in the Wainwright would do nothing but stir up bad memories, when we should be looking toward our future. “That’s a hard pass.”
“Are you sure?” Sam is still grinning. “Just think of the views.”
“I’m more than sure,” I say, looking out over the Boston skyline as the last golden rays of sun peek between the buildings. Because I like the view from here just fine, and right now, there’s nowhere else I’d rather be.