Providence Rag

by Bruce DeSilva

  He selects a nurse Barbie, tears off her uniform, and lays her naked on the floor. He studies her for a moment. Then, whack! He chops off her right leg.

  He grins, pretending he can hear her scream.

  Whack! Her other leg.

  Whack! Her right arm.

  Whack! Her left arm.

  And finally, her head.

  He does the same with bathing beauty Barbie.

  Then a go-go Barbie.

  Then another.

  And another.

  A half hour later, he sits there with his penis in his hand, surrounded by dismembered dolls in an imaginary pool of blood.

  10

  July 1994

  On the twelfth day after the Stuart murders, Mulligan parked Citation on the street across from the murder house, got out, and started knocking on doors again. He figured he was wasting his time. The police had already talked to everyone in the neighborhood more than once. But he was haunted by what he’d learned from Schutter. He couldn’t sit around doing nothing.

  He’d just finished listening to a middle-aged woman prattle about the good-for-nothing police department when he spotted a black teenager riding a bicycle no hands down the middle of the street. It looked like the same kid he’d talked to outside the Medeiros house two years ago. What was his name? Oh, yeah. Kwame something.

  “Hey, Kwame!”

  The kid rolled up to the curb and braked.

  “You’re that reporter.”

  “That’s right. Mulligan, from the Dispatch.”

  “Are the cops ever gonna catch the guy or what?” Kwame asked. “My mom’s really scared.”

  “They’re doing the best they can,” Mulligan said.

  The kid had grown several inches since he’d last seen him. And he had a gauze bandage on his right thumb.

  “So, Kwame. How’d you hurt your thumb?”

  “A dog bit me.”

  “That right?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Mulligan reached for the hand. The kid jerked it back.

  Mulligan grabbed for it again and ripped the bandage off. Underneath was a clean, two-inch cut closed by what appeared to be eight or ten stitches.

  “That’s no dog bite,” Mulligan said.

  “The hell it ain’t.” The boy threw him a defiant glare. “You’re just hassling me ’cause I’m black.”

  “Look, kid. The cops think the person who killed your neighbors cut himself in the attack. If you hurt your hand breaking into a house or something, I don’t give a shit. Just tell me the truth, okay?”

  “I won’t get in any trouble?”

  “That’s right.”

  Kwame looked up at the sky as if he were thinking it over—or maybe making something up.

  “A week ago, when I was riding my bike, I saw this car that had a CD player sitting on the front seat. I been wanting one, you know. So I broke the car window with a rock and took it.”

  “And you cut your hand on the glass?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What kind of car was it?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know nuthin’ ’bout cars.”

  “Was it an old one?” Mulligan asked. Window glass in newer models would have shattered into harmless pellets.

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Where did this happen, exactly?”

  “Corner of Gordon and Taplow over by Oakland Beach Elementary.”

  “Okay, then. That explains it.”

  “Can I go?”

  “One last thing. What’s your shoe size?”

  “Ten,” the kid said.

  The reporter slid his foot next to the kid’s. Mulligan’s Reeboks were size eleven. Kwame’s Nikes were bigger.

  Mulligan watched the kid pedal down the street. Then he strolled to his car, drove to Gordon and Taplow, and scanned the pavement for broken glass. He even got down on his knees to search.

  He didn’t find any.

  Mulligan drove to the Warwick police station and checked the reports to see if someone had complained about a car being vandalized near the school. No one had.

  He walked upstairs to the detective bureau and asked for Jennings.

  * * *

  “You think a child could have done this?”

  “I think it’s worth checking out.”

  “Come on, Mulligan. You heard the FBI profile. The guy we’re looking for is in his mid- to late twenties. Besides, the kid you’re talking about is black.”

  “Black? What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “Black serial killers are extremely rare. And they only kill other black people.”

  “I’m sure you’re right, Andy, but would it hurt to run this by Schutter and see what he says?”

  * * *

  It took them ten minutes to make their way through the FBI phone tree and get the BSU agent on speakerphone.

  “This kid is how old?” the agent asked.

  “Fifteen,” Jennings said.

  “He would have been thirteen at the time of the Medeiros murder?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Look, Detective. The bureau has compiled detailed files on hundreds of serial killers. The youngest one we ever encountered started killing at seventeen. Ninety-nine point nine percent of them were at least twenty-one, and the average age at first kill is twenty-eight and a half.”

  “Maybe so,” Mulligan butted in, “but if Diggs isn’t involved, why the lies about his shoe size and the cut on his hand?”

  “He could be covering for something worse than breaking a car window,” Schutter said. “Perhaps a housebreak or a robbery.”

  “Or murder,” Mulligan said.

  Schutter had nothing to say to that.

  “Something else about the kid is nagging at me,” Mulligan said. “The footprints in the Medeiros house were size twelve, but the ones at the Stuart house were size thirteen. Unless we’re looking for two different guys, which you say we’re not, our killer is still growing.”

  “I wouldn’t put any stock in that,” Schutter said. “Prints made by stocking feet can be deceptive.”

  “In what way?”

  “They vary in size depending on whether the socks are loose or pulled on tight. No way this kid’s your killer. Don’t waste your time on him.”

  * * *

  After they hung up, Mulligan pulled out a cigar and set fire to it.

  “Not supposed to smoke in here,” Jennings said. Then he shrugged, slipped a pack of Marlboros from his shirt pocket, and got one going.

  “I still think it’s worth looking into, Andy.”

  “Tell you what. After we finish recanvassing for the third friggin’ time, I’ll talk to the kid, see what he has to say. And Mulligan?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Stay the hell away from him and leave the investigation to the professionals.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  * * *

  As he drove to work the next morning, Mulligan couldn’t get Kwame Diggs out of his head. Before checking in at the sports desk, he decided to talk things over with the city editor.

  “Schutter is full of shit,” Lomax said.

  “How so?”

  “Ever heard of Tommy Knox?”

  “Knox? Who’s he?”

  “Back in the 1960s, he was the starting fullback for the Tolman High School football team in Pawtucket. He was also a psychopath. He raped and murdered two women and badly injured a third; and he was the prime suspect in two other sex killings.”

  “How old was he?”

  “Eighteen when they caught him, but when he killed his first victim, he was only fifteen years old.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “He committed suicide in prison.”

  “The BSU didn’t get started until the 1970s,” Mulligan said.

  “Yeah,” Lomax said. “That’s why Schutter never heard about this.”

  11

  That afternoon, Mulligan braced teenage boys in Kwame Diggs’s neighborhood, asking if they
knew how he’d hurt his hand. He drew a blank until, around suppertime, he stumbled onto Eddie Hendricks.

  He was fourteen. A friend of Kwame’s. The two of them, he told Mulligan, liked to play touch football in the street.

  “Any idea how he cut his thumb?”

  “Naw.”

  “Look,” Mulligan said, “I think he might be the one who killed your neighbors.”

  Eddie’s eyes got wide.

  “Better tell me what you know.”

  “I don’t know nothin’.”

  “You can talk to me, or you can talk to the police,” Mulligan bluffed. “You must have asked him about it. What did he say?”

  The kid fell silent and studied his feet.

  “Come on, Eddie. Out with it.”

  “He told me it was just a little cut,” Eddie finally said. “He didn’t want to say how he got it. But this morning, he knocked on my door and said that if the cops came around asking about it, I should tell them he got hurt breaking into a car.”

  Mulligan took out his phone and called Jennings. “I’ve got something new on Kwame Diggs,” he said.

  “I thought I told you to stay away from this.”

  “Yeah, yeah. I know. But you really need to hear what I’ve got.”

  * * *

  Next morning, Jennings and Mello drove to the Diggs house and knocked on the door. No one answered. They were just climbing back into their unmarked car when they saw a heavyset black teenager cruising down the street on his bicycle.

  “Are you Kwame?” Jennings asked.

  “Who’s askin’?”

  “I’m Detective Jennings and this is Detective Mello,” the lead detective said, extending his right for a shake. Kwame hesitated, then took it. Jennings pretended not to notice the bandaged thumb.

  “You the cops trying to figure out who killed all those people?”

  “We are.”

  “What’s the holdup, man? People around here are crazy scared.”

  “Can I tell you a secret?” Jennings asked.

  “Uh. I guess.”

  The detective leaned in close. “We don’t have a clue who did this. Looks like the bastard’s gonna get away with it.”

  “No shit?”

  “No shit. We’re just spinning our wheels now, reinterviewing people in the neighborhood who didn’t know anything the first two times we talked to them.”

  “Damn.”

  “Okay if we ask you a few questions?”

  “Me? I don’t know nothin’.”

  “Sometimes people know more than they think, Kwame. You could have seen some little detail that might point us in the right direction.”

  As Jennings talked with Kwame, Mello opened the back door of the cruiser, pulled out two cans of Coke, and popped one open.

  “Hot as hell out here,” he said. “Want a Coke, partner?”

  “Yeah, thanks.”

  Mello tossed him a can, and Jennings made a two-hand catch.

  “Hey, got another one back there for Kwame?”

  Mello fetched another Coke, careful to handle only the top rim, and handed it to the boy. Kwame gripped it in his right and popped the tab with his left thumb.

  “So, Kwame,” Jennings said, “have you seen any unfamiliar vehicles around the neighborhood this summer?”

  “Not really,” he said, and gulped from the can.

  “Seen any strangers lurking around?”

  “I ain’t seen nothin’ like that.” Another gulp.

  “What about your friends?” Mello asked. “Any of them mention seeing something suspicious?”

  “Nah,” Kwame said, and drained the can.

  Jennings waited for the kid to drop the empty into the gutter. He didn’t.

  “Well, thanks anyway,” Jennings said. He and Mello got back into their car and watched Kwame pedal away down the street.

  “Why didn’t you take the can from him?” Mello asked.

  “If we made him suspicious, he probably wouldn’t give it up,” Jennings said, “and wrestling it from him would smear the prints.”

  Kwame reached the corner, turned left, and tossed the empty into the street. It bounced, rolled, and teetered at the edge of a storm drain. The detectives waited until the boy was out of sight before driving to the corner. Mello pulled a latex glove onto his right hand, got out of the car, picked up the can by the rim, dropped it into an evidence bag, and climbed back into the passenger seat.

  “Think we got lucky?” he asked.

  “Maybe,” Jennings said. “The kid gripped the can pretty tight, didn’t move his hand around any that I could see, so I don’t think he smudged the prints.”

  * * *

  Two days later, the state crime lab matched Kwame Diggs’s prints to the ones that had been lifted from the light bulb, front window, and kitchen windowsill at the Medeiros house. And to the knives, medicine cabinet, and downstairs windowsill in the Stuart house.

  That evening, Jennings tracked down a Superior Court judge and got him to sign a warrant.

  When police rapped on the door of the Diggs residence the following morning, the boy’s parents were both at work. By law, that didn’t matter. Warrant in hand, they could have kicked the door down and tossed the place. But they didn’t have to. Kwame answered their knock and let the officers inside. Then he stretched out on the living room couch and turned on the TV.

  As Jennings and Mello searched the house and grounds, two patrolmen, hands resting on the butts of their semiautos, watched the teenager munch Oreo Double Stuf cookies, swig Coke, and chuckle at a marathon telecast of Voltron: Defender of the Universe, a cartoon about a giant robot.

  Upstairs, Jennings rummaged through Kwame’s bedroom. In the closet, he found two pairs of size thirteen Nikes. Stuffed inside one shoe was a plastic bag containing what looked like a half ounce of marijuana. Then he rooted under the bed and pulled out a stash of slasher videos: Prom Night, Friday the Thirteenth, Halloween, and A Nightmare on Elm Street.

  Outside, Mello combed through the backyard garden shed. Concealed inside a bag of potting soil, he discovered a Folgers coffee can. He pried off the plastic top, dumped the contents into a gloved hand, and let out a whoop.

  He tugged an evidence bag out of his pocket and dropped Becky Medeiros’s heart-shaped locket inside. Then he pulled out another bag for the earrings that had been torn from Connie Stuart and her daughters.

  The detectives met in the kitchen to share what they’d found. Then they dragged Diggs up from the couch, cuffed him, read him his rights, and led him outside. At the curb, Mulligan stood beside a Dispatch photographer who captured the moment for the front page.

  Jennings and Mello shoved their prisoner into the back of a patrol car. As it rolled away, the two exhausted detectives wrapped their arms around each other and wept with relief.

  * * *

  That evening, Jennings, Mello, and Mulligan were too keyed up to sleep, so they joined the department celebration at the FOP lodge. Word had spread about the kid reporter’s role in the arrest. Everyone in the place wanted to buy him a drink.

  By nine P.M., Mulligan was in an alcoholic fog. He drained his seventh bottle of Narragansett, slid off the bar stool, and staggered to the men’s room to empty his bladder. And to get a moment alone with his thoughts.

  He had no illusions about his role in the murder investigation. He knew the cops would have caught Diggs eventually. But would they have figured it out before he killed again?

  Mulligan hated every minute he’d spent on this story. Until Kwame Diggs came along, he’d lived life just fine without getting this close to evil. He wondered if he’d ever get the stench of gore out of his dreams. But after a decade devoted to playing games and more than three years writing about others who played them, he’d done something that mattered. He understood, now, how Rosie felt—and it felt good. Maybe he was cut out for this kind of thing.

  He’d heard that Vic Stanton was planning to resign from the Dispatch’s five-man investigative team to t
ake a job at The New York Times. Would Lomax consider an inexperienced sportswriter for one of the most coveted jobs at the paper?

  “I helped catch a serial killer,” he told himself as he backed away from the urinal. “How many reporters can say that?”

  He reclaimed his seat at the bar just as Malcolm Roberts, the state prosecutor assigned to the Diggs case, walked in and found everybody backslapping and offering toasts.

  Roberts broke the mood.

  “There’s something you all need to know,” he told the revelers. “Rhode Island’s criminal codes haven’t been updated in decades. When they were written, no one ever envisioned a child as twisted and dangerous as Kwame Diggs. The law says that juvenile offenders, no matter what their crimes, must be released and given a fresh start at age twenty-one. The attorney general is going to ask the legislature to rewrite the law so this won’t happen again. But they can’t change it retroactively.

  “In six years, the bastard will get out and start killing all over again.”

  July 1994

  The boy sprawls on his jail cell bunk and studies a spider. It’s spinning a web on the ceiling. It has a plan. It knows exactly what it’s doing.

  Why didn’t he wear gloves?

  Why didn’t he bring a hunting knife, something with a blade that wouldn’t break off?

  Why didn’t he jerk off into a hand towel and take it away with him?

  He’d been impulsive and reckless. He sees that now. Still, he might have gotten away with it if it weren’t for that fucking reporter.

  Then he smiles, knowing he’ll be free again in half a dozen years. Even the public defender says so.

  He pictures his trophies sealed in a plastic bag inside an evidence locker. He wishes he’d hidden them better so he could dream on them again when he gets out.

  Next time, he’ll think things through. Next time, he’ll be like the spider.

  He pulls himself to his feet, climbs onto the bunk, and plucks the bug from its web. He jumps to the floor, sits on the edge of the mattress, opens his palm, and gazes at the predator’s swollen belly, its quivering legs.