Providence Rag

by Bruce DeSilva

  “What’s wrong?” Rosie asked. “I thought you’d be on top of the world today.”

  “I feel more like it’s on top of me.”

  “Want to talk about it?”

  Mulligan just shook his head. He picked up his beer and took a pull.

  “How’s the training going?” he asked.

  “Great. One more week and I’ll be a full-fledged Providence firefighter. They already told me I’ll be assigned to the station in our old neighborhood.”

  “Good for you. That’ll be me cheering right up front at graduation. I might even pull the fire alarm to celebrate.” He pulled a cheap cigar out of his shirt pocket and set fire to it. “You know, Rosie, we’ve talked about this before, but I still don’t understand why you turned down that offer from the New York Liberty.”

  She’d been a star at Rutgers, breaking every career scoring and rebounding record for the Scarlet Knights and even making the cover of Sports Illustrated. After her senior season, she was the second player chosen in the WNBA draft.

  “That was a children’s game,” she said. “Now I want to do something important.”

  “Not me.”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Nope.”

  She swiveled on her stool and draped an arm over his shoulder.

  “What happened to becoming the next Seymour Hersh?”

  “I’m over that. I took the sportswriting job to get my foot in the door, figuring once they saw what I could do, I could maybe work my way onto the investigative team. But now I just want to get back to covering the Brown Bears and the Friars.”

  “That’s your dream? Writing about sweaty ballers for the rest of your life?”

  “It’s what I’m cut out for.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “They get elbowed, tackled, or thrown out at third, but nobody gets stabbed.”

  Rosie stretched out her arms and wrapped him up in a hug.

  “I could hold you here until you come to your senses.”

  That sounded fine to Mulligan. He felt like hiding there for the rest of his life.

  * * *

  Mulligan stopped at the Cumberland Farms on North Main Street, grabbed a loaf of Wonder Bread, and asked the girl behind the counter for a package of Garcia y Vega cigars. To him, they tasted like shredded cardboard laced with citronella, but on a rookie sports reporter’s pay, they were the best smokes he could afford.

  As he slid back into Citation, his mobile phone rang.

  “Mulligan.”

  “It’s Lomax. What time can you get in tomorrow?”

  “I thought I was back on vacation.”

  “I’d like you to stick with the murder case for a while.”

  Jennings’s recounting of the horrors inside Becky Medeiros’s house flashed through Mulligan’s mind. He didn’t want anything more to do with stories like that.

  “The murder case? Can’t Hardcastle handle it?”

  “The Warwick PD is shutting him out. Apparently there’s some bad history there. I need you on this, Mulligan. You’re the only one the cops are talking to.”

  “I’ve got plans to spend the week in Boston,” Mulligan lied. “Got seats for the whole Sox home stand.”

  “I’ll find a way to make it up to you. Suppose I have the sports editor add you to our World Series coverage in the fall? How’s that sound?”

  Mulligan could see there was no way to talk Lomax out of this.

  “All right, Mr. Lomax. I’ll be on it first thing Monday morning.”

  “Good. And Mulligan?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Call me Ed.”

  6

  “You look tired, Andy.”

  “I’ve got a right to. I’ve barely slept the last four weeks.”

  “Still no leads?” Mulligan asked.

  “Nothing but dead ends.”

  It was Fourth of July weekend, the temperature peaking at ninety-six degrees outside the air-conditioned sanctuary of the Fraternal Order of Police lodge on Tanner Avenue in Warwick; but the Medeiros case had grown as cold as the inside of a morgue drawer.

  “The tip I gave you didn’t go anywhere?”

  “Ralph Branco was obsessed with Becky. You got that part right. The greasy little creep dated her a few times after her divorce, and he couldn’t stand it that she had the sense to dump him for Miller. But his alibi for the night of the murders checks out. And he wears a size ten shoe. No way he could have made those footprints on the rug.”

  Jennings drained his bottle of Narragansett and asked for another.

  “How’d you find out about him?” he asked Mulligan. “We’d totally missed that.”

  “His name came up in a bar conversation with a couple of locals last week.”

  Jennings raised an eyebrow.

  “I’ve been asking around,” Mulligan said. “Same as you.”

  “Makes me wonder what else we missed,” Jennings said, pausing to take another swallow. “Half the force has been working on this. We’ve questioned everyone we can think of who might have had contact with Becky. Postal workers. Meter readers. Trash collectors. Gutter cleaners. Landscapers. When that didn’t pan out, we widened it to people she dealt with away from home. Gas station attendants, checkout clerks, bank tellers, pharmacists, co-workers, hairdressers, her manicurist, her doctor, her friends. Her ex-husband, of course. A couple of them had sheets, but none of them matched the physical evidence, and none of them seemed to have a reason to kill her. As far as we can tell, no one did.”

  “So now what?”

  “Now we go back to the beginning and start over. The killer was sloppy and careless. He left physical evidence all over the place. If his prints were on file, the bastard would already be in custody. The prosecutor says that once we find him, the conviction’s gonna be a slam dunk. But if this was just a random crime of opportunity, we may never figure out who did it.”

  “Unless he kills again,” Mulligan said.

  April 1991

  Street football. Five kids on each side. No tackling, just touch, which cuts down on the ways the boy can hurt people.

  Eddie hasn’t shown up today, so they have to let the dumb girl play. Jenny is fast. The boy has to give her that. She’s tall, too. Taller than any of the guys. Except him, of course. Long, gangly legs like a colt that just dropped out of its mama. Ugly metal braces on her buckteeth. A blackhead on her nose that she doesn’t have the sense to pop. And no tits on her skinny-ass chest.

  He’s pissed off just looking at her, split out to his right as if she thinks he would actually throw her the ball. It’s bad enough that they’re letting the bitch play. Why does she have to be on his team?

  The boy grunts, “Hut!,” takes the snap, and drops back to pass. He always plays quarterback because he can throw the ball farther and straighter than any of the others. He looks left and sees Vinnie, the little Italian kid, churning his stubby legs as he tries to get open. Fat chance of that. Then he glances right and sees that Jenny has beaten her defender by a good five yards.

  The street is nearly empty of cars today. The only vehicle in sight is Becky Medeiros’s Toyota Celica, parked at the right-side curb about thirty yards away.

  Jenny is looking back over her shoulder now, waving her arm and calling for the ball. What the hell. He rears back and lets the football fly, aiming for the yellow “Smile. God Loves You” bumper sticker on the back of the car.

  The throw leads her right into it, just as he intended. She hits the back of the car with a thud and falls hard to the pavement.

  The other kids rush to her side. The boy hangs back, not wanting them to see how hard he is laughing. He sticks around, admiring his handiwork, until the ambulance comes to take her away.

  7

  June 1994

  Mulligan finished his phone interview with Big East Conference commissioner Mike Tranghese, hung up, and started typing.

  The conference’s four big-time football schools, Syracuse, Boston College,
Pittsburgh, and Miami, were threatening to secede. If they went through with it, they’d take the league’s lucrative CBS-TV contract with them, leaving the remaining six teams, including Providence College, in the lurch. It was a big story. If Mulligan could get it in print before anyone else broke it, he’d make national news.

  “Mulligan?”

  “Not now.”

  “This is urgent.”

  “So’s what I’m doing.”

  “Mulligan, look at me and pay attention.”

  He looked up and saw Lomax hovering over his desk.

  “What is it?” He turned back to the keyboard and kept typing.

  “There’s been another multiple murder in Warwick.”

  Mulligan raised his hands from the keys.

  “Look, Ed, I’ve got a big story on my hands. Can’t this wait?”

  “How big?”

  Mulligan told him.

  “Okay. But as soon as you’re done, come see me.”

  Mulligan finished the story, turned it in, and answered the sports editor’s questions about his sources. It was an hour before he reluctantly made his way toward the city editor’s desk. He wanted nothing more to do with murders, yet the memory of Becky Medeiros’s face in that family photograph propelled him across the room.

  He pulled up a chair across from Lomax and asked, “What do we know?”

  “We’ve got three victims,” Lomax said. “Connie Stuart, age thirty-three, and her two daughters, ages eight and twelve. They were killed sometime late last night or early this morning. Other than that, the cops aren’t saying anything.”

  “What does this have to do with me?”

  “The scene is just a couple of blocks from where Becky Medeiros and her daughter were butchered two years ago.”

  “Oh, hell.”

  “Yeah. Hardcastle’s at the scene, but as usual the Warwick cops are stonewalling him. I thought maybe you could tap the source you cultivated on the Medeiros case.”

  Mulligan took a deep breath and slowly expelled it.

  “I’d rather not,” he said. “I’m not an ‘if it bleeds, it leads’ kind of guy. I still have nightmares from the last time you sucked me in.”

  Lomax leaned back in his chair and gave Mulligan an appraising look.

  “This is a big story, kid. I’d hate to get beat on it.”

  Mulligan didn’t say anything.

  “I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t really need you on this.”

  “You can’t find somebody else?”

  “Not somebody with your source.”

  Mulligan looked at his feet and shook his head.

  “Look,” Lomax said. “Sometimes you have to accept an assignment you don’t want. It’s part of being a professional.”

  Mulligan had heard the line before. It was the standard boilerplate Dispatch editors used on reluctant reporters. And it was meant to be a conversation stopper.

  “Okay, Ed,” Mulligan said. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  He went back to his desk and dialed the phone.

  “Detective Jennings.”

  “Hi, Andy. It’s Mulligan.”

  “Got no time for you now, kid. Get back to me in a few days.”

  Mulligan thanked him and hung up. Then he pulled out his wallet, removed the yellowing newspaper photograph of the Medeiros family, and smoothed it out on his desk. The picture reminded him, as if he needed reminding, of why he didn’t want to cover stories like this.

  It also reminded him of why somebody should.

  8

  Three days dragged by before Jennings found the time to meet Mulligan at Dunkin’ Donuts on Greenwich Avenue in Warwick. Three days in which Mulligan and Hardcastle had to listen to Lomax rant about tight-lipped cops and about reporters who couldn’t come up with anything about a goddamned triple murder.

  It was the same doughnut shop where Mulligan and Jennings had their first conversation two years earlier. Since then, it had become their spot, the two of them getting together once or twice a month to share their passion for the PC Friars and the Boston Red Sox. Jennings was already there, nursing a cup of black coffee, when Mulligan strolled in and dropped into the booth.

  “Hey, Mulligan. How’s your mom doing?”

  “Not so good.”

  “Aw, hell.”

  “It’s stage four uterine cancer, Andy. The doctors can’t do anything but try to make her comfortable.”

  Jennings shook his head sadly, then reached across the table and rested his hand on Mulligan’s shoulder. “How long has she got?”

  “A few months, maybe.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  The two friends sat quietly, each lost in his own thoughts.

  “You look like shit,” Mulligan finally said.

  “That’s what working seventy-two hours straight will do to you.”

  “Think it’s the same guy?”

  “Oh, yeah. No question. A print we lifted from one of the murder weapons came back a match to the prints from the Medeiros case. But I knew as soon as I saw the bodies. The crime scenes are that similar.”

  “Why don’t you start at the beginning,” Mulligan said, “and tell me everything.”

  “I’ll give you what I can, but I have to hold back a few details only the perp could know.”

  * * *

  The evening before the murder, Connie Stuart and her twin sister, Mary O’Keefe, decided to go shopping. Mary picked Connie up and drove her to the Warwick Mall, where they bought new bathing suits and some shorts for the summer. Mary got the new Bon Jovi CD. Connie picked out a new set of kitchen knives.

  On the way home, they talked about whether they should move in together now that it was clear that Connie’s wayward husband wasn’t coming back. Mary dropped her sister off at her house at nine forty-five P.M.

  At eight the next morning, Mary called Connie, but she didn’t answer. Three hours later, when Connie still wasn’t picking up, Mary got a little worried, so she drove over. Connie didn’t answer the door, but Mary had a copy of the house key. She let herself in.

  The 911 call came in at 11:21 A.M. Saturday morning.

  Help. Please help. There’s blood everywhere. It’s my sister. And her kids. Oh, God. They must be dead. So much blood.

  Officers Peralta and Berube arrived first. They took a quick look inside the house, backed out, secured the scene, and called for detectives. Jennings and Mello got there just before noon.

  Upstairs in the master bedroom, the detectives found a flowered sheet soaked crimson. It was draped over a lump centered neatly in the middle of a queen-size mattress. Jennings pulled the sheet aside, exposing Connie Stuart’s naked body. Her arms and legs were arranged like the points of a star. On the floor at the foot of the bed, two more lumps lay beneath a chenille bedspread that had once been white. Beneath it, Mello found Sara, eight, and Emma, twelve, dressed in matching Little Mermaid pajamas. Blood had soaked through the mattress and pooled on the floor. The oak headboard, the walls, and the ceiling were splattered with it.

  * * *

  “The Stuart place backs up on a vacant lot, just like the Medeiros residence,” Jennings said. “No trees, this time. Just a lot of scrub brush. The killer hid in a thicket a few yards from the back fence and spied on the family off and on for weeks.”

  “For weeks? How do you know that?”

  “He made a little nest for himself in the leaves. And he left a dozen roaches behind.”

  “So he would have known that her husband moved out weeks ago,” Mulligan said.

  “That’s the way I see it. Late Friday night or early Saturday morning, he came out of his hiding place and jumped the chain-link fence. He crossed the yard, pried the screen off an unlocked window, and slid it open. Then he took his shoes off and climbed inside.

  “He left a lot of physical evidence behind, just like last time. It tells a story, if you know how to read it.”

  * * *

  The killer found Connie’s new set of KitchenAid knives, still
unopened, on the butcher-block kitchen counter. He ripped the top off the box and tore through the packaging, scattering cardboard and Styrofoam on the floor.

  Carrying the four biggest knives, he crept up the carpeted stairs to the second floor and entered the dark bedroom where Connie was sleeping. He jumped on top of her and pounded her face with his fists. Then he used one of the knives to slice her nightgown from neckline to hem. He yanked it off her and tossed it over a bedpost. Then he went to work with the blades.

  Sara and Emma must have heard their mother’s screams. They leaped from their beds and ran into her room. There, the two children fought for their lives and the life of their mother, the killer’s blades slicing their hands and arms as they tried to drive him off. But he was much too strong. When they fell to the floor, he continued to stab them, striking so hard that he broke off two blades in Emma’s chest.

  When he was done, he dropped the knives and padded down the hall to the upstairs bathroom, leaving a bloody trail of footprints on the hardwood floor.

  At the bathroom sink, he flipped on the faucet and rinsed the blood from his face and hands. Perhaps it was then that he noticed he was bleeding. Somehow, he’d cut himself with one of the knives. Maybe his hand had slipped as he savagely plunged a blade into Connie. Or maybe it had happened as he struggled with the children.

  He pulled a lilac towel from the rack and used it to stanch his wound. Then he rummaged through the medicine cabinet, knocking bottles of aspirin and cold tablets, a child’s thermometer, and a box of tampons into the sink. He found a package of Band-Aids, tore it open, and slapped one on the cut. He dropped the crumpled bandage wrapper in the sink and the bloodstained towel on the bathroom floor. Testing proved the blood on the towel didn’t come from his victims.

  He returned to the bedroom, plucked souvenirs from Connie and her children, and covered their bodies. Then he carried his treasures down the stairs and exited the way he came, leaving fingerprints on the windowsill.

  Outside, he pulled off his socks, put on his running shoes, and sprinted across the backyard, leaving size thirteen tracks in the soft ground. Before reaching the property line, he paused beside the swing set and vomited in the grass. Then he grabbed hold of a tree branch, stripping it of leaves as he hauled himself over the fence.