She opened her mouth to scream.
He charged into the hallway, grabbed her by the throat, and slammed her against the wall. Her head dented the plasterboard. Stunned, she slumped to the floor. He dashed back to the kitchen, clawed through the drawers under the counter, and pulled out an eight-inch chef’s knife.
In the hallway, Becky staggered to her feet, her left temple dribbling blood. He lowered a shoulder and flew at her, hitting her the way he’d seen Andre Tippett, the New England Patriots’ all-star linebacker, T-bone running backs on TV. She went down hard, landing on her back. He pounced and raised the knife. She screamed and deflected the blade with her arms.
Becky was young and strong. She battled ferociously in that cramped space. But he outweighed her by 130 pounds. In a minute, maybe less, she lay motionless, her breathing ragged, blood bubbling from the holes in her chest.
“Mama?”
He looked up and saw the little one standing a few feet away, rubbing the sleep from her eyes. She was dressed in My Little Pony pajamas like the ones his sister used to wear. He rose to his knees, swung the knife, and cut her down. Then he turned back to Becky, stabbing with such force that the steel blade snapped off at the handle.
Becky’s screams had made his ears ring in that narrow hallway. Had her cries alarmed the neighbors? He got to his feet, stepped through an archway into the living room, and padded across the carpet to the front window. Pulling the curtain aside, he pressed his forehead against the glass and peered out. Nothing was stirring.
He returned to the kitchen, drew two more knives from a drawer, and went back to work on Becky, stabbing her in the chest and abdomen long after he was certain she was dead. Finally he clambered to his feet, his face, hands, and hoodie drenched in her blood, and rinsed himself off at the kitchen sink.
Then he walked back to the hallway, stood over the bodies, unzipped his fly, and freed his erection. He spit on his right palm, stared at the woman, and moved his fist rhythmically, glorying in the power he’d felt as the knife penetrated her skin again and again. He threw back his head and moaned.
When he was done, he reached down and jerked a heart-shaped silver locket from the slim chain around Becky’s neck-a keepsake to hold whenever he relived this night.
Stepping over the bodies, he entered Becky’s room, tore a mint-green satin comforter from her bed, and threw it on the floor. He stripped off the matching sheet, carried it into the hallway, and draped it over the dead. Then he walked back to the kitchen and peeked out the open window. The same stillness greeted him. Satisfied that no one was watching, he shoved the dinette table aside and climbed out.
He sat on his rump in the grass, pulled off the bloody socks, and put his shoes back on, not bothering with the laces. It was raining harder now. Taking the socks with him, he sprinted across the backyard and jumped the fence. He fetched his binoculars from beneath the white pine. Then he pulled off his hoodie and did a poor job of hiding it and his socks, cramming them under some brush in the wooded lot.
Ten minutes later, he sneaked into his family’s sleeping house and crept up the stairs to the second floor. There he showered before flopping into bed, feeling euphoric but exhausted. Clutching Becky’s locket in his hand, he fell into a blissful, dream-rich sleep.
2
The 911 call was logged in at 6:34 A.M. The caller was so distraught that the dispatcher couldn’t make sense of anything he was saying. She got him to calm down long enough to tell her where he was and sent a two-man patrol car with no clear idea of what they’d find when they got there.
Seven minutes later, Patrolmen Oscar Hernandez and Phil Rubino screeched up to the house and saw a man on his knees on the front walk. He was screaming, and his hands and shirt were drenched in scarlet.
Hernandez drew his gun and covered the guy while Rubino shoved him face-first to the ground, pulled his arms back, and cuffed him. They asked him his name. He couldn’t stop screaming. Rubino dug the wallet out of the man’s pants and found a Rhode Island driver’s license identifying him as Walter Miller, 34. He lived there. The officers checked him over and determined that he wasn’t injured. The blood belonged to somebody else.
Miller finally stopped screaming. He appeared catatonic now. The officers read him his Miranda rights, locked him in the back of the patrol car, and called for backup. Then they argued about what to do next. Hernandez wanted to sit tight until backup arrived. Rubino figured somebody inside the house was badly hurt and might die if they waited. He left his partner with the suspect and raced up the front walk with his weapon in his hand.
The front door was ajar. Rubino rapped on it, identified himself as a police officer, and stepped inside. Bloody shoe prints marched across the beige living room carpet, marking a path between the front door and an archway that led to the back of the house. A second blood trail, this one made by larger feet, stretched from the archway to the living room’s picture window and back again.
Skirting the gore, Rubino crossed the living room, stepped through the arch, and entered a hallway. There, the walls were splashed with blood, and the hardwood floor was slick with it.
The bodies of two females, an adult and a child, were lying faceup, partially draped with a red-stained sheet. The heads and necks of the victims were exposed, as if someone had pulled the covering aside to take a look. Rubino hesitated, unable to reach the victims without stepping in their blood. Then he went to them, checked for pulses, and found none. His eyes lingered on the little girl longer than he wanted them to.
He exited the house just as backup arrived, called the dispatcher, and asked her, in a measured professional voice, to send detectives. Then he sat on the hood of the patrol car and wept.
Warwick chief of detectives Andrew Jennings and his partner, Detective Charlie Mello, arrived shortly after seven A.M. They found Hernandez standing guard over Miller. Other patrolmen were watching the house’s exits to make sure no one got in-or out.
Jennings opened the back door of the patrol car and spoke to the suspect. He didn’t respond. His eyes were wild and unfocused.
Mello and Hernandez kicked in the back door, and Rubino and Jennings entered through the front. No one noticed Rubino’s slight hesitation. They searched all six rooms and the garage. They found no one left alive.
The officers exited the house and called for the medical examiner.
August 1989
That damned mouse. That’s what his mother keeps calling it. She buys three spring-loaded bar traps, the kind that snap the neck, and places them in the corners of her cheerful yellow kitchen. That night his father throws them out, goes down to the Ace Hardware store on West Shore Road, and returns with a live-catch trap. He can’t bear to kill anything, not since those things he did in the war.
Next morning, the boy rises early. He wanders into the kitchen in his Red Sox pajamas, opens the refrigerator, takes out a quart of orange juice, and drinks straight from the carton. That’s when he hears it, a furious scratching. He gets down on his hands and knees on the black-and-white checkerboard floor and peers into the metal trap. A mouse, eyes bright with panic, is trying mightily to claw its way out.
It’s a little brown-and-white field mouse. The boy thinks it’s cute.
He runs up the stairs to his room and tugs on jeans, sneakers, and a T-shirt. The shirt has the rap group Public Enemy’s logo, a figure in a rifle’s crosshairs, on the front. He tiptoes down the hall to the den and finds his father’s cigar lighter by the ashtray on the desk. It’s a butane torch lighter, the kind that works like a little flamethrower. He goes down the stairs to the kitchen, picks up the trap, tucks it under his arm, and goes outside.