Providence Rag: A Liam Mulligan Novel (2 page)

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.

The boy is very happy that his father threw out the kill-traps.

A dead mouse wouldn’t be this much fun.

A dead mouse wouldn’t scream.

3

June 1992

Liam Mulligan’s earliest memory was of his father returning home from his milk delivery route, collapsing into his platform rocker, and pulling out his Comet harmonica. Later, when Mulligan was in his teens, his dad would fold himself into that chair every night and play along with a scratchy Son Seals, Buddy Guy, or Muddy Waters record, even though the chemo had drained him.

That’s how Mulligan learned to love the blues—although no one would have mistaken his father for Little Walter.

Saturday afternoon, Mulligan flipped through his late father’s records, selected Son Seals’s
Bad Axe
LP, and placed it gently on the family turntable. Then he fetched that old harmonica from its place of honor on the mantel. Settling into that same squeaking rocker, he tapped his left foot to the first few bars of “Don’t Pick Me for Your Fool.” Then he put the harmonica to his lips and honked along with the blues man’s guitar. No one, Mulligan figured, was going to mistake
him
for Little Walter either.

The album had wound its way to the fifth cut, “Cold Blood,” when his mother stuck her head out of the kitchen. She paused for a moment to listen, the sound of the harmonica conjuring warm memories of her husband.

“Liam? You have a phone call.”

“Who is it?”

“Some guy from the paper.”

Probably the sports editor with a question about the last story Mulligan had turned in. The one about Coach Frank “Happy” Dobbs’s struggle to recruit players for the sad Brown University basketball program. He got up and wandered into the kitchen, where the wall phone was mounted beside the wheezing fifteen-year-old Frigidaire.

“Tell him you’re on vacation,” his mother whispered, and handed him the receiver.

“Mulligan.”

“Sorry to disturb your Saturday afternoon, Mr. Mulligan. Was that your girlfriend who answered the phone?”

“My mother.”

“You live with your mother?”

“She needs help with the rent. Who am I talking to?”

“Ed Lomax, the city editor. Can you give us a hand with a breaking story?”

“Give you a hand with a story?” Ever since middle school, Mulligan had repeated questions while pondering his answer. It was a habit he was trying to break. “I think you got the wrong guy, Mr. Lomax. I work in sports.”

“I’m aware of that, Mulligan, but the summer vacation schedule has left us shorthanded. I asked the sports editor if he could spare someone. He offered you.”

“I just started
my
vacation.”

“Then reschedule.”

Mulligan didn’t say anything.

“Or if you prefer,” Lomax said, “I could pay you overtime.”

“Overtime? I could use the money. What do you need?”

“There’s been a double murder in Warwick. Hardcastle, our lead police reporter, has been at the scene since this morning, but the police are stonewalling him. Meet him there and see what you can do to help.”

Mulligan wasn’t sure what he’d be able to accomplish aside from standing around looking like a sportswriter. But overtime was overtime.

“Okay. Gimme the address.”

*   *   *

It was nearly five
P.M
. by the time Mulligan braked his rusting seven-year-old Yugo to a stop a block from the crime scene. That was as close as he could get. The suburban street was clogged with police cars, TV satellite vans, and a medical examiner’s wagon. He was just climbing out when a uniformed officer bellowed at him.

“Get that heap of junk outta here!”

“Please don’t talk to Citation that way, Officer,” Mulligan said. “He’s very sensitive about his looks.”

“You
named
your Yugo?”

“Yes, sir.”

“After a
racehorse
?”

“No. After the three speeding tickets I got the first week I owned him.”

“That clunker goes fast enough to get speeding tickets?”

“This little honey can do forty in a school zone.”

The cop chuckled, his face softening a little. “Still gotta move it. No unauthorized vehicles allowed on the street.”

“I’m with
The Providence Dispatch
.”

“Oh. Got some ID?”

Mulligan pulled out his wallet and flashed his press card.

“Shoulda showed me that in the first place.”

Yellow crime scene tape had been strung across the trunks of four red maples that bordered the front yard of a white-shingled ranch-style house. Outside the tape, a gaggle of print, radio, and TV reporters milled around on the sidewalk. None of them appeared to be doing anything. Mulligan recognized Billy Hardcastle, a rawboned redneck who had hired on with the
Dispatch
after five years as the police reporter at the
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

“I’m Mulligan.”

“I know who you are,” Hardcastle said. “You cover sports. You see any sports goin’ on here?”

“Mr. Lomax sent me to give you some help.”

Mulligan extended his right hand. Hardcastle ignored it.

“I
told
that SOB I don’t need no goddamn help.”

“You don’t?”

“I don’t. And I sure as hell don’t have time to wet-nurse a rookie. Jesus! What the fuck was Lomax thinkin’?”

Mulligan shrugged.

“Now that I’m here, is there something you’d like me to do?”

“Yeah. Leave.”

“What if I talk to the neighbors, see if they know anything?”

“You don’t think I thought of that? I’m way ahead of you, kid.”

“What’s everybody standing around for?”

“The chief’s gonna come out in a few minutes and tell us what the hell’s going on. I expect you to be gone by then.”

“Maybe I could—”

“Maybe you could shut your pie hole and keep the fuck outta my way.”

“Sure. I can do that.”

So Mulligan, who’d never been this close to a murder, kept the fuck outta Hardcastle’s way. He stood silently on the sidewalk and scanned the faces gathered around the house. The cops with their drained eyes. The frightened neighbors standing on the other side of the street. The print and broadcast journalists hungry for a headline. Hardcastle was right. He didn’t belong here.

Forty minutes dragged by before Chief Walter Bennett of the Warwick PD strode out the front door of the murder house and approached the police line. Reporters shouted questions. The chief held up both hands to silence them.

“Here’s what I can tell you. We have two victims, Becky Medeiros, twenty-eight, of this address, and her four-year-old daughter, Jessica. Next of kin has been notified, so it’s okay to report the names. We have a suspect in custody. That is all I am prepared to say at this time.”