Bruce DeSilva - Providence Rag

He paused, swiped the tears away with his palm, and continued, his voice stronger now.

“Nothing will ever bring my boy back, but I promise that this madman will never enjoy a single day of freedom. If Eric Kessler gets out of prison, I’m going to kill him.”

That sounded like an applause line to Mulligan, but it stunned the crowed into silence.

“Still,” Freeman said, “I’d rather not get locked up myself. So I have come here to ask, to demand, that the folks with the power to stop this do the right thing. They say the law requires that Kessler be released. I say there is a higher law that says he must not be.”

This time, the applause line did its job.

“Attorney General Roberts is here with us this morning,” Freeman said. “I’d like him to come to the microphone now and tell us what he’s going to do about this.”

The crowd booed and hooted as the patrician, silver-haired politician, who had first come to public attention as the lead prosecutor at Kwame Diggs’s murder trials, stepped to the lectern.

Iggy elbowed him aside and shouted, “What? I still can’t hear you. Show him how you really feel.”

Visibly irritated, Roberts stiff-armed Iggy away from the microphone.

“Two days ago,” Roberts said, “Eric Kessler was observed flushing paper towels down the toilet in his cell. That is a violation of prison rules. For this offense, corrections officials were able to shave thirty days from the good time he earned during his years of incarceration. This fortunate turn of events has provided us with additional time to find a resolution to our dilemma.”

That provoked angry shouts.

“That’s it ?”

“That’s all you’ve got?”

“Impeach Roberts!”

The crowed took up the chant: “Impeach Roberts! Impeach Roberts!” The attorney general’s expression never changed. He waited for the chants to subside before continuing.

“We are attempting to persuade Mr. Kessler that it would be in his best interest to agree to voluntary commitment in a secure psychiatric hospital upon his release.”

That provoked a scattering of applause.

“If he refuses, we could ask a judge to order his involuntary commitment,” Roberts said. “However, I don’t want to mislead you. As a rule, the courts are very reluctant to issue such orders.”

With that, the crowd howled in protest. Roberts shrugged and stepped back. Iggy took his place at the microphone and led the crowd in the chant: “Impeach Roberts! Impeach Roberts! Impeach Roberts!”

After a few minutes of this, Iggy raised his hand to silence the crowd, urged everyone to flood the attorney general and the governor with letters and e-mails, and thanked everyone for coming.

“They sure were pissed,” Gloria said as she and Mulligan headed back to the newspaper to file the story.

“You really can’t blame them,” Mulligan said. “They’ve got a lot of things to be angry about.”

“You think this is about more than Kessler?”

“Oh, sure. Rhode Island’s unemployment rate is the second highest in the country. Half the home mortgages in the state are underwater. Most of our cities and towns can’t afford to pay the pensions they’ve promised to teachers, cops, and firemen. Central Falls is in bankruptcy, Pawtucket is on the brink of it, and Woonsocket is in such a mess that it’s begging the state to take over its school system.”

“And don’t forget Curt Schilling,” Gloria said. The former Red Sox World Series hero’s video game business was in so much trouble that the state was on the verge of losing the entire seventy-five million it had loaned him to lure the company to Providence.

“That’s right,” Mulligan said. “All Iggy Rock has done is gather all that fear and anger and focus it on Kessler. When he’s finished with that, he’ll get people worked up about something else. It’s what he does.”

“He’s good at it,” Gloria said. “You gotta give him that.”

“He is,” Mulligan said. “Imagine what he’ll do with the Diggs case when he finds out what Thanks-Dad is up to.”

Back in the newsroom, Mulligan called Providence police headquarters and asked the desk sergeant for the official crowd estimate.

“Six thousand,” he was told.

Mulligan thanked him and hung up.

Crowd estimates, Mulligan knew, were the product of a dishonest, age-old game between cops and journalists. Cops knew journalists were going to ask for them, so they just pulled numbers out of their asses. Journalists then published the figures even though they knew they were bullshit.

It was a lesson Mulligan had learned back in 2004 when he covered the Boston parade celebrating the Red Sox’s World Series victory over the St. Louis Cardinals. When he wrote the story, he left out the official crowd estimate.

“Why isn’t it in here?” the city editor had demanded.

“Because it’s three point two million,” Mulligan had said.

“So?”

“The population of Boston is six hundred thousand. If every man, woman, and child in the city, including those who don’t give a rat’s ass about baseball, had actually shown up, another two point six million people would have had to drive in from out of town. No way that happened. If it had, they’d still be looking for parking spaces.”

The city editor had ordered him to put the number in the story anyway.

It was a fight Mulligan couldn’t win. He dutifully dropped the inflated six thousand figure into his story about the statehouse rally for Tuesday morning’s paper.

Gloria was seated alone at a table in back, working on her second Thursday afternoon Bud, when Mulligan walked into Hopes with a bulging shopping bag under each arm.

“That all of it?” she asked.

“It is.”

“How long did it take you to print all this out?”

“Nine hours.”

“I believe it. You look like you didn’t get much sleep.”

“I don’t want Mason to know what we’re up to,” Mulligan said, “so I had to wait until he went home last night.”

“What time was that?”

“After ten.”

“He’s dedicated,” Gloria said.

“Yeah, but so are we.”

Mulligan dumped the bags, and computer printouts of every crime story and police log the paper had published about Diggs’s hometown of Warwick between 1988 and 1994 spilled onto the table. Back then, before the paper started to retrench, there was a five-person news bureau in Warwick; and every police report, from murders to dogs hit by cars, ended up in the Dispatch ’s West Bay edition.

“You take 1988 through 1990,” he said. “I’ll take the rest.”

“What am I looking for?”

“Serial killers start with small cruelties and gradually work their way up to murder. Look for unsolved cases of Peeping Toms, animal torture, arson, and assaults on women and children. He was just a kid back then, not old enough to drive, so focus on addresses within a mile or two of his house.”

“And what are you looking for?”

“Unsolved assaults, murders, or attempted murders between 1991, the year before he killed Becky Medeiros and her daughter, and 1994, when he slaughtered the Stuart family.”

The official name of the bunkerlike, reinforced concrete building off Interstate 95 in Cranston is the High Security Center, but no one in Rhode Island calls it that. To the locals, it’s Supermax, and it warehouses the state’s most violent criminals.

It was built in 1981, when a glad-handing former beer salesman named J. Joseph Garrahy was governor. He made sure it was big enough to house 138 men. But now, only 84 of Rhode Island’s 3,311 inmates were considered badass enough to be locked up there.