“If they can do this to him,” Mason said, “they can do it to anybody.”
“But they don’t.”
“How do you know?”
Mulligan didn’t have an answer for that.
“After I talked to Mrs. Diggs,” Mason said, “I called Olivia Monteiro at the ACLU.”
“So?”
“She was reluctant to talk about it at first. She kept saying nothing good could come from dredging up the whole story.”
“She’s right.”
“I disagree.”
“So you pressed her.”
“I did. I couldn’t get her to speak on the record; but off the record she thinks it’s a conspiracy-that prison officials, prosecutors, and judges all know the charges they keep bringing against Diggs are bogus.”
“Good for them,” Mulligan said.
“She thinks even Diggs’s lawyer may be in on it.”
“Good for him, too.”
Mason sadly shook his head. “I thought you’d care about this.”
“I don’t. Monteiro isn’t all that hot and bothered about it either. If she were, she’d file a civil rights suit on Diggs’s behalf.”
“So it’s up to us,” Mason said.
Mulligan stared at him. Subtract the Ivy League pedigree, the trust fund, and the Giorgio Armani suit worth more than Dispatch reporters made in a month, and the kid reminded him of himself-back when Mulligan was young and naïve, before two decades of working as a reporter had taught him how the world works.
“Look,” Mulligan said, “I admit you’ve got a point. The law should apply equally to everybody. In a democracy, the authorities don’t get to make up the rules as they go along.”
“That’s right.”
“But what do you think would happen,” Mulligan went on, “if you proved officials are falsifying charges against Diggs?”
“I’d be able to write a great abuse-of-power story.”
“Yeah. But they’d also have to let Diggs out.”
“I suppose they would.”
“And if he gets out, he’ll kill again.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Yes, I do,” Mulligan said. “Kwame Diggs is a serial killer. Every night for the last eighteen years, he’s been lying in his prison bunk, fantasizing about stabbing women and children to death.”
“What makes you think that?”
“It’s what monsters do.”
Mason fell silent and thought about it for a while.
“I still think we have an obligation to look into it,” he said.
“So who’s stopping you?”
“I could use your help.”
“No way,” Mulligan said.
“Saying no to the publisher’s son might not be a smart career move.”
“When have I ever made a smart career move, Thanks-Dad?”
“Stop calling me that. I can’t help it that my father is the publisher.”
“Then why do you keep reminding me?”
They were both chuckling now, the momentary tension between them gone.
“What the hell,” Mulligan said. “There’s no future here anyway.”
15
Gloria perched on the edge of her desk chair and squinted at the picture on the twenty-seven-inch iMac computer monitor with her one good eye.
The photo froze Kwame Diggs as he was being led inside the Superior Court building in Providence, his hands cuffed behind his back and his legs hobbled by a short steel chain. Two state cops held his bulging biceps in a tight grip. They were big men, but Diggs made them look like dwarfs. At six feet five and 330 pounds, he appeared fit enough to play nose tackle for Gloria’s favorite team, the New England Patriots. Just behind him, two more state cops stood with shotguns at port arms.
Gloria clicked the mouse, zooming in for a closer look at the vacant expression on Diggs’s concrete block of a face. She remembered exactly how she’d felt when she snapped the photo last year. She’d drawn the assignment to get a picture of Diggs as he was being taken to court to answer for his latest assault on a prison guard. She’d shot a lot of photos that day, but her hands had shaken so badly that this was the only one that wasn’t a blurry mess.
Gloria closed the picture, searched the archives, and called up the file photo of Eric Kessler. A Dispatch photographer had taken it at the killer’s last court appearance three decades ago. Kessler had been a big guy, too, but in his case, most of the weight was flab. She clicked the mouse again, zooming in on a face that looked as if it had been sculpted from a block of suet.
Kessler looked much creepier than Diggs, she thought, so why didn’t his picture scare her as much? For a moment, she worried that it was because Kessler was white and Diggs was black. But no, that wasn’t it. She’d never been one of those women who clutched her purse tighter when she passed a black man on the sidewalk. Then it came to her. Kessler’s victims were boys, but Diggs had butchered three little girls and two women. Blond women who looked a lot like her. She remembered, then, how he had turned to leer at her as he was led up the courthouse steps. She called up Diggs’s photo again. It made her shiver.
This morning, she’d caught wind of what Mason was up to. It was hard to keep secrets in the Dispatch’s newsroom.
What the hell was the publisher’s son thinking?
16
Wednesday morning, Mulligan was summoned to Lomax’s office. He slumped into a red leather chair, took a pull of coffee from a Styrofoam cup, and said, “What’s up, boss?”
“We got ourselves a situation,” Lomax said.
“And what would that be?”
“It’s Mason.”
“You’re gonna have to be more specific.”
“The kid’s got a bug up his ass about Kwame Diggs.”
“So I hear.”
“I don’t want any part of it,” Lomax said.
“Me either.”
“Then how come you’re helping him?”
“I’m not.”
“He says you are.”
“Uh-uh. I told him no way.”
“Guess he’s not taking no for an answer,” Lomax said.
“Looks like.”
“I told him no, too,” Lomax said. “Actually, I think I said, ‘Fuck, no.’”
“And he reminded you that he’s the publisher’s son,” Mulligan said.
“That he did. He also reminded me that if the Dispatch manages to stay afloat, he’s going to be my boss someday.”
“So the young pretender is starting to throw his weight around,” Mulligan said.
“Oh hell, yeah.”
“Meet the new boss, same as the old boss,” Mulligan said.
“Huh?” The managing editor was not a Who fan.
Lomax took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes.
“You know,” he said, “maybe you should help him.”
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
“That way you can keep an eye on him, let me know what he’s up to.”
“Is that an order?”
“Yeah. But Mulligan?”
“Um?”
“Don’t help him too much.”
Mulligan had been writing about crime and political corruption for nearly twenty years now. For more than a decade, he’d been a member of the paper’s elite investigative team. After it was disbanded and three of its members laid off, he still eked out time for investigative work between routine assignments that used to be handled by reporters who were now collecting unemployment checks. Over the years, he’d learned a few things about serial killers. He knew, for example, that they have always walked among us.
In the fifteenth century, a wealthy Frenchman named Gilles de Rais kidnapped and slaughtered somewhere between one hundred and eight hundred peasant children. In the sixteenth century, a Hungarian aristocrat named Elizabeth Báthory tortured and murdered an estimated six hundred young girls. Herman Webster Mudgett, one of the first American serial killers, lured victims to his hundred-room World’s Fair Hotel in Chicago in the 1890s, gassed them, and sold their skeletons to medical schools. Mudgett confessed to twenty-seven murders, but historians think there may have been two hundred and fifty. By those standards, Kwame Diggs was an underachiever.