Bruce DeSilva
Providence Rag
The third book in the Liam Mulligan series, 2014
For my children, Richard, Melanie, and Jeremy;
and for their children, Alexandra, Jason, Anthony,
Lillian, Ella, Benjamin, and Josephine.
No father or grandfather has ever been more blessed.
And for my wife’s granddaughter, the irrepressible Mikaila,
whom we were privileged to raise to adulthood
and who has kept us both young.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This novel was inspired by two of Rhode Island’s most notorious murder cases. However, the tale told in these pages is in no way intended to be a true account of the killers, their victims, the police who investigated the crimes, the lawyers and judges who adjudicated the cases, the jailers who confined the guilty, or the journalists who told their stories. The characters’ personalities, actions, thoughts, and dialogue are entirely the product of the author’s imagination. Although I have named a few characters after old friends, they bear scant resemblance to them. For example, the real Don Sockol is a Rhode Island educator and former journalist, not a Corrections Department clerk. A handful of real people, including Boston Red Sox World Series hero Curt Schilling, are mentioned in passing. However, only three of them-Roomful of Blues vocalist Phil Pemberton, WPRO radio newsman Ron St. Pierre, and CNN correspondent Nancy Grace-have speaking parts; and they are permitted only a few lines of fictional action or dialogue. Rhode Island geography is as accurate as I can make it, but I have played around a bit with space and time. For example, Hopes, the newspaper bar where I drank decades ago when I reported the news for the Providence Journal, is long gone, but I enjoyed resurrecting it for this story. I also borrowed the colorful nickname of a former Rhode Island attorney general; but the fictional and real Attila the Nun are nothing alike, and the character’s actions and dialogue are entirely imaginary.
Some humans ain’t human.
– John Prine
PART I: Precocious Boys
May 1989
The child holds the Mason jar up to the light and studies the wriggling mass inside. The quivering antennae, the thrashing legs, the compound eyes, the gossamer wings folded tight against segmented green abdomens. The unmown field behind his house is alive with them. He’d spent half the morning stalking these bits of life, snatching them from the waving blades of switchgrass with his big, strong hands.
On his knees now, he opens the jar, snares one with a thick finger, and screws the lid on tight. He places the prisoner on one of the flat stones that litter the field and holds it down with his left thumb. Then he reaches into the hip pocket of his jeans and extracts his 5× magnifying glass. The sun is high, and the glass focuses its wrath into a tight beam.
A wing curls into ash.
The grasshopper struggles, its six legs making a faint scratching sound as they rake the stone. The boy burns the legs off one by one, and the scratching stops. Carefully, he amputates each antenna. A brown, unblinking eye stares up at him, pleading for an end to this. He stares back, savoring the moment. Then he drags the beam across the abdomen to the eye, instantly obliterating it.
A thin curl of white smoke rises as he bores through to the knot of ganglia that passes for a brain. The boy bends close, sniffs. The aroma reminds him of meat frying in his mother’s kitchen.
With a start, he feels a swelling in his jeans.
He wonders: Am I God?
1
June 1992
After her live-in boyfriend was transferred to the graveyard shift, Becky Medeiros fell into the evening habit of lounging around the house in her underwear. Or sometimes in the nude. She kept the front and side curtains drawn after dark, but the house backed up on a wooded lot, so she was often careless with the rear windows.
The neighborhood potheads had discovered her habit. After sundown, they often gathered beneath the low branches of a large white pine ten yards from her back fence to pass a joint and enjoy the show. Later, police would find a disturbance in the thick blanket of pine needles. Forty-five discarded roaches and a scattering of torn Doritos bags and Snickers wrappers told them someone had been lurking there on and off for weeks.
Becky was an attractive young woman. Slim waist, long muscular legs, small firm breasts. A dancer’s body. The watchers whispered crude jokes and imagined what it would be like to screw her. All but one of them. He harbored a different fantasy.
It had been an unusually hot and dry Rhode Island spring; but on the evening of Friday, June 5, the temperature fell into the low sixties, and threatening clouds shimmered like embers beneath the setting sun. Shortly before ten, it began to rain. Only a few drops penetrated the pine’s thick branches, but the weather had kept the other peepers away. This time, he had the hiding place all to himself.
He yanked a handkerchief from the front pocket of his hoodie, wiped raindrops from his binoculars, and raised them to his eyes. There she was, naked in the warm glow of her bedside lamp as she stretched and twisted to a yoga instructional video flashing blue on the small television above her bureau. She bent at the waist now, right hand touching left ankle, her ass an offering.
From weeks of watching, he knew she rarely turned in before Late Night signed off. But tonight she killed the TV after David Letterman’s monologue and slipped out of the bedroom. A moment later, the bathroom light snapped on, narrow beams leaking between the cracks of the venetian blinds.
He swept the binoculars back and forth from the bathroom to the bedroom until, ten minutes later, she reappeared wrapped in a hot-pink towel. She dropped the towel to the floor, sat on the edge of her bed, and turned off the bedside lamp.
He lingered under the tree, giving her time to fall asleep. Then he laid his binoculars in the pine needles, crawled out from under the branches, vaulted her white picket fence, and crossed the wet grass to the rear door. There, an overhead lamp was burning. He reached up and gave the bulb a twist, extinguishing the light.
He tried the door. It was locked. He considered breaking a pane of glass to reach the inside latch, but that would make too much noise. Instead, he edged along the back of the house, looking for another way inside.
The kitchen window was open a crack. Perhaps Becky had forgotten to close it. Perhaps she had wanted to let the cool night air in. He pried off the screen and eased the window up. Then he sat on his haunches, removed his size twelve Nikes, placed them in the grass, and hoisted himself into the dark house.
He landed with a thud on the dinette table, knocking over the salt and pepper shakers. They rolled off the edge and shattered. He slid off the table, got to his feet, and froze, listening to the sounds of the dark house. At first, he heard only the ticking of a clock. Then the refrigerator clicked on and hummed to itself. He broke into a nervous sweat. After three or four minutes, he was desperately thirsty.
When he was confident that Becky had not awakened, he padded across the linoleum to the refrigerator, opened the door, and saw several cans of Diet Coke, a carton of orange juice, and a sippy cup half filled with milk. He grabbed the OJ and gulped, dribbling some down the front of his hoodie.
He set the carton on the counter and had just closed the refrigerator when the bedroom door creaked. He spun toward the hallway and saw Becky standing there in the nude. Perhaps the racket he’d made had roused her after all. Or maybe she’d just gotten up to go to the bathroom. She knew who he was. She’d often seen him riding his bike through the neighborhood and throwing a football in the street.