“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.