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For my children, Richard, Melanie, and Jeremy;
and for their children, Alexandra, Jason, Anthony,
Lillian, Ella, Benjamin, and Josephine.
No father or grandfather has ever been more blessed.
And for my wife’s granddaughter, the irrepressible Mikaila,
whom we were privileged to raise to adulthood
and who has kept us both young.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This novel was inspired by two of Rhode Island’s most notorious murder cases. However, the tale told in these pages is in no way intended to be a true account of the killers, their victims, the police who investigated the crimes, the lawyers and judges who adjudicated the cases, the jailers who confined the guilty, or the journalists who told their stories. The characters’ personalities, actions, thoughts, and dialogue are entirely the product of the author’s imagination. Although I have named a few characters after old friends, they bear scant resemblance to them. For example, the real Don Sockol is a Rhode Island educator and former journalist, not a Corrections Department clerk. A handful of real people, including Boston Red Sox World Series hero Curt Schilling, are mentioned in passing. However, only three of them—Roomful of Blues vocalist Phil Pemberton, WPRO radio newsman Ron St. Pierre, and CNN correspondent Nancy Grace—have speaking parts; and they are permitted only a few lines of fictional action or dialogue. Rhode Island geography is as accurate as I can make it, but I have played around a bit with space and time. For example, Hopes, the newspaper bar where I drank decades ago when I reported the news for the Providence Journal, is long gone, but I enjoyed resurrecting it for this story. I also borrowed the colorful nickname of a former Rhode Island attorney general; but the fictional and real Attila the Nun are nothing alike, and the character’s actions and dialogue are entirely imaginary.
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Author’s Note
Epigraph
Part I: Precocious Boys
May 1989
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
August 1989
Chapter 3
January 1990
Chapter 4
October 1990
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
April 1991
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
September 1991
Chapter 9
January 1992
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
July 1994
Part II: Nobody’s Right When Everybody’s Wrong
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
February 2000
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
June 2006
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
May 2012
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
July 2012
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Part III: Predation
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
September 2012
Acknowledgments
Forge Books by Bruce DeSilva
About the Author
Copyright
Some humans ain’t human.
—John Prine
PART I
Precocious Boys
May 1989
The child holds the Mason jar up to the light and studies the wriggling mass inside. The quivering antennae, the thrashing legs, the compound eyes, the gossamer wings folded tight against segmented green abdomens. The unmown field behind his house is alive with them. He’d spent half the morning stalking these bits of life, snatching them from the waving blades of switchgrass with his big, strong hands.
On his knees now, he opens the jar, snares one with a thick finger, and screws the lid on tight. He places the prisoner on one of the flat stones that litter the field and holds it down with his left thumb. Then he reaches into the hip pocket of his jeans and extracts his 5× magnifying glass. The sun is high, and the glass focuses its wrath into a tight beam.
A wing curls into ash.
The grasshopper struggles, its six legs making a faint scratching sound as they rake the stone. The boy burns the legs off one by one, and the scratching stops. Carefully, he amputates each antenna. A brown, unblinking eye stares up at him, pleading for an end to this. He stares back, savoring the moment. Then he drags the beam across the abdomen to the eye, instantly obliterating it.
A thin curl of white smoke rises as he bores through to the knot of ganglia that passes for a brain. The boy bends close, sniffs. The aroma reminds him of meat frying in his mother’s kitchen.
With a start, he feels a swelling in his jeans.
He wonders: Am I God?
1
June 1992
After her live-in boyfriend was transferred to the graveyard shift, Becky Medeiros fell into the evening habit of lounging around the house in her underwear. Or sometimes in the nude. She kept the front and side curtains drawn after dark, but the house backed up on a wooded lot, so she was often careless with the rear windows.
The neighborhood potheads had discovered her habit. After sundown, they often gathered beneath the low branches of a large white pine ten yards from her back fence to pass a joint and enjoy the show. Later, police would find a disturbance in the thick blanket of pine needles. Forty-five discarded roaches and a scattering of torn Doritos bags and Snickers wrappers told them someone had been lurking there on and off for weeks.
Becky was an attractive young woman. Slim waist, long muscular legs, small firm breasts. A dancer’s body. The watchers whispered crude jokes
and imagined what it would be like to screw her. All but one of them. He harbored a different fantasy.
It had been an unusually hot and dry Rhode Island spring; but on the evening of Friday, June 5, the temperature fell into the low sixties, and threatening clouds shimmered like embers beneath the setting sun. Shortly before ten, it began to rain. Only a few drops penetrated the pine’s thick branches, but the weather had kept the other peepers away. This time, he had the hiding place all to himself.
He yanked a handkerchief from the front pocket of his hoodie, wiped raindrops from his binoculars, and raised them to his eyes. There she was, naked in the warm glow of her bedside lamp as she stretched and twisted to a yoga instructional video flashing blue on the small television above her bureau. She bent at the waist now, right hand touching left ankle, her ass an offering.
From weeks of watching, he knew she rarely turned in before Late Night signed off. But tonight she killed the TV after David Letterman’s monologue and slipped out of the bedroom. A moment later, the bathroom light snapped on, narrow beams leaking between the cracks of the venetian blinds.
He swept the binoculars back and forth from the bathroom to the bedroom until, ten minutes later, she reappeared wrapped in a hot-pink towel. She dropped the towel to the floor, sat on the edge of her bed, and turned off the bedside lamp.
He lingered under the tree, giving her time to fall asleep. Then he laid his binoculars in the pine needles, crawled out from under the branches, vaulted her white picket fence, and crossed the wet grass to the rear door. There, an overhead lamp was burning. He reached up and gave the bulb a twist, extinguishing the light.
He tried the door. It was locked. He considered breaking a pane of glass to reach the inside latch, but that would make too much noise. Instead, he edged along the back of the house, looking for another way inside.
The kitchen window was open a crack. Perhaps Becky had forgotten to close it. Perhaps she had wanted to let the cool night air in. He pried off the screen and eased the window up. Then he sat on his haunches, removed his size twelve Nikes, placed them in the grass, and hoisted himself into the dark house.
He landed with a thud on the dinette table, knocking over the salt and pepper shakers. They rolled off the edge and shattered. He slid off the table, got to his feet, and froze, listening to the sounds of the dark house. At first, he heard only the ticking of a clock. Then the refrigerator clicked on and hummed to itself. He broke into a nervous sweat. After three or four minutes, he was desperately thirsty.
When he was confident that Becky had not awakened, he padded across the linoleum to the refrigerator, opened the door, and saw several cans of Diet Coke, a carton of orange juice, and a sippy cup half filled with milk. He grabbed the OJ and gulped, dribbling some down the front of his hoodie.
He set the carton on the counter and had just closed the refrigerator when the bedroom door creaked. He spun toward the hallway and saw Becky standing there in the nude. Perhaps the racket he’d made had roused her after all. Or maybe she’d just gotten up to go to the bathroom. She knew who he was. She’d often seen him riding his bike through the neighborhood and throwing a football in the street.
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.