A NOISE OUTSIDE HIS BEDROOM WINDOW WOKE DOUG WELLS FROM
a sound sleep. The clock on the nightstand said 3:40
A.M.
Doug was too tired to reach over and turn on the light, let alone get up and investigate. He was determined not to lose any sleep over that bitch Emma rejecting him again—for good, this time. So far, he’d been fabulously successful. Sleeping like a baby. A stupid bat flying into the window or a branch brushing up against the building wasn’t going to change that. His head sank back into his pillow, his eyelids slowly closed, and he felt his mind drifting back into dreamland.
Another bang at the window—this one was so sharp that it sent him sitting bolt upright in the bed.
What the hell?
He listened carefully, but there was silence. Part of him wanted to go back to sleep, but that last noise didn’t sound so ordinary. He climbed out of bed, crossed the dark room, and went to the window. The blinds were shut. He wasn’t sure why—he’d never been afraid to live alone—but something made him think twice about opening those blinds. He did it quickly.
The glass was black with night.
He reached over for the lamp and switched it on—and what he saw gave him a start. It was right in front of his eyes, stuck to the window. A piece of paper. A note. Handwritten. He leaned closer to read it.
“Open the door. Let’s talk again. Babes.”
Doug felt tingles. He wasn’t sure what “again” meant, but Babes must have considered Doug’s pitch on the radio as their first talk. His stunt on Ryan James’s show had worked.
In your face, Emma.
Doug ran to his closet and grabbed his robe, but he threw it aside. Not exactly the power look. He rummaged for real clothes: a shirt and pants. The adrenaline was flowing. This was big. Sure, his J-school professors would have cringed at his tactics. They taught the future reporters of the world never to make themselves part of the story. But some of the biggest names in the business had made their careers by ignoring that rule—and not just in recent history. Did anyone criticize Woodward and Bernstein for selling the movie rights to Hollywood for
All the President’s Men
? Did anyone ever tell Dan Rather that he should have gone off camera to confront the Chicago police at the 1968 Democrat National Convention? Even the right-as-rain
New York Times
had cooperated with law enforcement and published the Unabomber’s rambling manifesto.
Now it was Doug Wells’s turn.
He pulled on his shoes and raced down the hall.
It seemed a little strange that Babes hadn’t just knocked on the front door. Maybe he had, and Doug had slept through it. Either way, Babes was here now and had the full attention of the rising star at
Action News
. Doug turned the deadbolt and pulled open the door.
The force that hit him was like a charging bull.
Doug tumbled head over heels into the hallway. The door slammed shut. Before he could react, a huge hulk of a man was on top of him.
“Don’t move,” the intruder said.
Doug felt the barrel of a gun pressing up under his chin. One squeeze of the trigger and a bullet would shatter his jaw, rip through his brain, and come out the top of his head.
“Don’t shoot,” Doug said, barely moving his mouth.
“Don’t resist.”
The man turned him over with ease, partly because of his strength, partly because Doug was so compliant. He pulled Doug’s hands behind his back and fastened them with plastic handcuffs. They were cinched too tightly, and the narrow bands of flexible plastic cut into his wrists.
“Now, I want you to get up slowly.”
Doug complied. The man had an accent, Doug noticed.
Russian?
“We’re going to the bedroom.”
The bedroom. A million thoughts ran through his head, none of them pleasant.
Doug felt the barrel of the gun against the back of his head. With his hands behind his back and an armed Russian grizzly bear breathing down his neck, fighting didn’t seem like an option. Slowly he walked down the hallway toward his bedroom. The Russian was right behind him. He stopped Doug at the open doorway.
“Inside,” the man said.
Doug entered, and the gun felt glued to the base of his skull. He was standing at the foot of the bed when the Russian told him to stop.
Doug closed his eyes, then opened them slowly. His throat was going dry.
This
was not what he’d had in mind when he decided to take the plunge and make himself part of the story.
“What do you want?” Doug said.
“Shut up.”
The response cut through him like a knife. The man had a frightening edge to his voice, one that offered no room for negotiation.
“Turn around, slow.”
The thought of coming eye to eye with his attacker sent Doug’s pulse rate off the charts. Only a killer would let the victim see his face. Doug turned so slowly that he almost lost his balance. He didn’t want to look but—
thank God!
—the Russian’s face was unrecognizable, utterly distorted by the nylon stocking pulled over his head. Maybe he didn’t plan to kill him after all.
A good thing.
“Kneel,” the Russian said.
A bad thing.
Slowly, with obvious reluctance, Doug lowered himself to his knees. He looked down at the man’s shoes.
“You seemed very excited to talk to Babes.”
Doug didn’t know what to say—couldn’t even begin to guess what the right response might have been.
“Have you talked to him?” the man said.
“No. Never.”
“Liar. That’s why I wrote ‘Let’s talk
again
. If you never talked to him, you would have known the note was bogus.”
“I just figured my call to the radio show counted as our first talk.”
“Nice try. But I still say you’re lying.”
“It’s the truth.”
“What did he tell you about Chelsea James’s car crash?”
“Nothing. I’ve never talked to him. I swear.”
He grabbed Doug by the throat. Doug’s Adam’s apple was suddenly in a vice grip, and his lungs yearned for air.
“I’m going to give you one more chance: What did Babes tell you?”
The Russian released his grip, and Doug coughed in his struggle for air. “I swear,” he said, coughing again. “We never talked.”
“I wish I believed you. I really do.”
Doug looked up. The Russian had a rope in his hand.
“What are you going to do?”
“You ever heard of a garrote?”
Doug shook his head with trepidation. The Russian went to the night table beside the bed, picked it up, and smashed it to pieces on the floor. He grabbed one of the broken legs with one hand and held the loop of rope in the other.
“Let me show you.”
He dropped the loop over Doug’s head. It hung around his neck like a noose. Then the Russian fed the table leg through the rope and turned it quickly, tightening the slack.
“I never met Babes!” said Doug. “I’d tell you everything if there was anything to tell. I never talked to the guy!”
“Let’s see if you’re still saying that five minutes from now.” He gave the table leg another turn. Doug’s head tilted back, and the noose gripped his neck.
He tried to talk—tried to plead—but he had no voice.
His groans turned to wheezing. His vision blurred. Another half turn of the garrote. Doug could no longer bear it. His body twisted, his legs swept out from under him, and he rolled to the floor. The Russian grabbed him from behind, maintaining pressure on the garrote as he buried his knee in Doug’s spine. Doug was pinned facedown on the floor, completely at the Russian’s mercy. His head pounded with congestion, like the worst sinus headache imaginable. His eyes bulged. His face flushed with red heat. It was as if he could hear nothing but his own desperate grunts, but then he heard something more.
The Russian was shouting at him.
Doug struggled to make out the words, wanted to answer if it would end this pain. But it was all running together.
The garrote tightened further. Doug tasted blood in his mouth.
The shouting continued, except that to Doug’s ears it no longer seemed like shouting. It sounded like…singing. The Russian was singing to him at the top of his lungs.
Then Doug’s eyes closed, and the singing stopped.
A PHONE CALL AT
4:25
A.M. WAS NEVER GOOD NEWS, ESPECIALLY
from the police. Emma sat up in her bed at the sound of Lieutenent Adler’s voice. Probable homicide. A battered body had been found under Pawtucket bridge number 550.
“What
bridge?” she said. Emma had lived in Rhode Island all her life, so street names—much less bridge numbers—meant nothing to her when it came to directions. Landmarks were all that mattered:
Turn right at the Dairy Queen, then go another mile past the redbrick building that used to be the A&P but closed about ten years ago.
“It’s where I-95 crosses the river,” said Adler, “south of old Slater Mill.”
“Got it,” she said.
Emma reached the crime scene before dawn and was glad to have her overcoat. Autumn had not yet officially arrived, but on the breezy waterfront at 5:00
A.M.
, it felt as though winter had.
The Seekonk River begins at Pawtucket Falls, just a hundred feet or so north of the I-95 bridge. The Seekonk was fed by the historic Blackstone River, truly the cradle of the Industrial Revolution, but two centuries of dyes, heavy metals, varnish, solvents, and paints had transformed the river into an industrial sewer. Mobsters joked that the quickest way to make someone “disappear” was to drop him into the river—alive. Great strides toward cleanup had been under way since Emma was a little girl, after a congressional report declared the river totally polluted and not suitable for bathing, though the warnings never seemed to deter the homeless.
Emma followed a footpath along the east bank. A deadly combination of early-morning commuters and all-night partiers zoomed overhead on six lanes of interstate. Skimming upriver in a needlelike scull was a rowing crew from Brown University, the team of oars dipping in rhythmic silence. A media helicopter hovered overhead, the first on the scene. In another thirty minutes remote broadcast crews from Providence and possibly even Boston would turn the surrounding area into a wintry forest of tall metal towers topped with microwave dishes.
I’m surprised Doug Wells isn’t here yet.
For now, the scene was all about police work. Uniformed officers and yellow crime tape closed off the entrance points to the riverfront on either side of the interstate. Emma stopped at the tape and watched for a moment as the crime scene investigators tended to the body beneath the bridge. It was like a well-oiled machine—swabs taken, photographs snapped, evidence gathered.
“This ain’t no peep show,” said one of the cops.
Emma met his sarcasm with a flash of her credentials, which got her past the outer perimeter. The temperature seemed to drop another five degrees as she entered the underbelly of the old bridge. It was a tired cantilever steel structure nearly 100 feet wide and spanning 695 feet across the river and two riverside streets. It badly needed replacement, but it got high marks from some of Rhode Island’s homeless, who didn’t seem to mind the overhead buzz of 172,000 vehicles a day.
Emma caught the eye of Lieutenent Adler, who recognized her.
“Got an ID of the victim yet?” she said.
Adler had the look and demeanor of a homicide detective who had seen far too many murders. He was a clenched fist of a man, perpetually tense and angry, his upper lip leathered from years of chain smoking.
“No,” he said. “Pretty obviously homeless. Really bad teeth—I’m guessing not just from lack of flossing. Probably meth addiction.”
“How long has he been dead?”
“Foo-owwas,” he said.
Emma had to translate in her head. Adler had one of those “Roe-Dyelin” accents that even natives had a hard time understanding.
“A few hours—so not much rigor mortis beyond the head and neck, I presume?”
“Nah much.”
Emma glanced toward the cloth-draped corpse. The examiners were getting ready to lift it onto a gurney. “Cause of death?” said Emma.
“Blunt trauma. Someone absolutely crushed the side of his head.”
“You have a murder weapon?”
“Yeah. Baseball bat was right next to the body. Traces of blood and human hair on it.”
The mere mention of anything “baseball” hit Emma like ice water. It was suddenly clear why she had been summoned to the scene. “I see,” said Emma.
Adler said, “Pretty careless to drop the bat right beside the body. If you’re not going to take it with you, at least throw it in the river.”
“People panic, they do strange things,” said Emma.
“Especially if they have one of those autism syndromes.”
Emma tried not to push back too hard. “I understand where you’re going with this. But just because a homeless man is beaten to death with a baseball bat doesn’t mean the killer was Ryan James’s brother-in-law.”
“I’d agree with you, except that this particular baseball bat happens to be signed by Ivan Lopez. I listen to Ryan’s radio show every morning. He and Ivan are best friends.”
More ice water. Emma knew it was true. “Anything else pointing you in that direction?” she asked tentatively.
“We found baseball cards in the victim’s coat pockets. Some are probably collectors’ cards, fairly valuable. There’s one of Carl Yastrzemski’s rookie season with the corner burned off. Possible evidence of motive there.”
“Motive?”
Adler shrugged, theorizing. “A guy like Babes is probably a loner, not many friends. He runs away from home, taking only his prized possessions: his baseball cards and an autographed bat. He calls in to Ryan’s radio show, tells the world he killed his sister”—
sistuh
—“and doesn’t know where to hide. He gets chummy with some homeless guy under a bridge. Homeless guy steals his baseball cards. Babes bashes his brains out with a baseball bat.”
“Makes sense,” said Emma. Almost too much sense. “Any witnesses?”
“So far we’ve talked to two other homeless folks. But they were clear on the other side of the river. Didn’t see anything, and with all this traffic noise, Lord knows they didn’t hear anything.”
“How about fingerprints?”
“Picked up some clean ones from the cards and the bat,” said Adler.
“We have Babes’s prints in the data bank,” she said. “The lab lifted one from my BlackBerry earlier this month.”
“Good to know. We’ll run it. Victim also had a cell phone on him—stolen, presumably. But the bat bashed it to bits. Not sure if we’ll get any latent prints or not, but our techies will track down the owner. If it belongs to Babes, that only strengthens my theory. Should have our answer before breakfast.”
“Doesn’t sound like you’re expecting any surprises,” said Emma.
“Been doing this too many
yizz
,” said Adler, looking off toward the river. “I’m done with surprises.”