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 take 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.
Then he closes his fingers and crushes it in his big, strong hands.
PART II: Nobody’s Right When Everybody’s Wrong
12
March 2012
Larry Bird had been living in Mulligan’s kitchen for less than a week, and already he’d become a big pain in the ass.
Every day, he shredded the newspaper he was supposed to shit on, kicked it through the bars of his cage, and watched it drop, shit and all, onto the scuffed linoleum floor. Every night, he let out two or three skull-piercing shrieks that made the veteran reporter bolt from his bed and grope for his gun. Larry knew only one English phrase, and he didn’t squawk it often; but when he did, Mulligan had to fight the urge to strangle him.
Mulligan brushed his teeth, tugged on his jeans, pulled on a Boston Red Sox T-shirt with Jacoby Ellsbury’s number 2 on the back, and was tying his black Reeboks when the fucker said it:
“Yankees win. Theeeeeeee Yankees win!”
Mulligan couldn’t figure it. Why would a guy name a bird after one of the greatest sports heroes in New England history and then teach it to talk that crap? But there was no way to find out now, because the asshole responsible for this abomination was dead.
Mulligan would have preferred a dog-a big one that would jump all over him when he came home from work, curl up beside him when he rooted for the Sox on TV, and snore contentedly every night at the foot of his bed. After several recent disappointments, he’d come to believe that the love of a dog was preferable to the love of a woman. Dogs were unwaveringly faithful, and not a one had ever lied to him. But the landlord didn’t allow dogs in this run-down tenement building in Providence’s Federal Hill neighborhood; and with Mulligan’s crazy hours, there was no way he could take care of one anyway.
The asshole, a small-time heroin dealer, had been sitting on the stoop outside his apartment in the Chad Brown housing project last Wednesday when a white Escalade rolled up, the passenger-side window slid down, and a dozen nine-millimeter slugs stuttered out. An hour later, Mulligan ducked under the yellow crime scene tape and yanked his reporter’s notebook from his hip pocket. He doubted he’d need it, but he figured on being ready in case the investigating detective broke precedent and said something worth printing in The Providence Dispatch. They’d just started wrangling when a uniform lugged a big brass cage out of the apartment and set it down in the blood on the stoop.
“Oops,” he said. “Sorry about that, Sarge.”
“No biggie,” the detective said.
“Really? Didn’t I just compromise the physical evidence?”
“Compromise?” Mulligan said.
“It’s what they’re taught to say at the Police Academy,” the detective said, “when what they really mean is ‘fuck up.’”
“Oh, shit,” the uniform said. “I can’t believe I did that.”
“Doesn’t matter, kid,” the detective said.
“It doesn’t?”
“It might if we went to trial,” the detective said, “but it’s not like we’re ever gonna ID the shooter.”
Mulligan and the detective watched the uniform lift the cage from the stoop. A little metal sign clipped to the bars read: “Larry Bird.” Inside the cage, a midnight-blue macaw squatted and took a dump.
“Looks like you’ve got a witness,” Mulligan said.
“Yeah,” the uniform said, “he must have heard the whole thing go down, but the shit-bird ain’t talking. I don’t think he likes cops.”
“Birds of a feather,” Mulligan said, and immediately regretted the cliché.
“You got that right,” the detective said. He pointed at the fresh graffiti scrawled next to the apartment door: If you see something, don’t say anything.
“Handsome bird,” Mulligan said.
“If you want it, it’s yours,” the detective said.
“You serious?”
“Why not? The skel with all the holes in him won’t be feeding it anymore, and I’d just as soon avoid dealing with the lazy pricks at Animal Control.”