Cliff Walk: A Liam Mulligan Novel (12 page)

“Try Alfred.”

“Oh, right. The butler.… Nope.”

“Dark Knight?”

“Bingo! I’ll go through his files and call you back.”

An hour later, she did.

“I didn’t find any videos at all,” she said. “He must keep them on a home computer, or maybe a portable hard drive.”

“Or maybe I was mistaken, Peggi. Go home, cuddle with Brady, and try to forget the whole thing.”

19

A state police cruiser, its lights flashing, had the entrance to the driveway blocked, so I pulled off the country road and parked Secretariat in weeds beside a rusted barbed-wire fence. Gloria Costa and I had smelled pig excrement a half mile down the road, and as we got out of the car, it was all we could do not to retch.

“Scalici
lives
here?” Gloria asked.

“He does. With his wife and two young daughters.”

“How do they stand it?”

“I don’t know. Guess they’ve gotten used to it.”

I fired up a cigar, and Gloria gave me a dirty look.

“That,” she said, “isn’t helping the situation any.”

“Is for me,” I said.

Gloria, one of the
Dispatch
’s few remaining photographers, had lost some weight during her comeback from a vicious assault last year. Her emotional recovery was still a work in progress, but physically she looked strong now, with curves reemerging in all the right places. Except for the black, pirate-style patch over her right eye, she resembled a young Sharon Stone.

“They gave me a glass eye, but I think it makes me look deranged,” she’d told me. I told her the eye patch was hot. I would have been tempted if I didn’t know Gloria had started seeing somebody—and if I weren’t looking to lawyer up.

Gloria was the best one-eyed photographer I knew, better than most shooters with two. I opened the back of the Bronco, and she fetched her camera bag. Cops can be squeamish about citizens carrying concealed weapons, so I left the Colt locked in the glove box.

As we approached the driveway, a trooper rolled down the window of the cruiser, looked us up and down, and said, “The
Dispatch,
right?”

“Right.”

“The captain figured you’d show. Said you should go up to the house and ring the bell.”

Halfway up the long gravel driveway, we veered away from the house and slogged across a muddy field toward the hog pens. There, three grim detectives wearing rubber boots and plastic gloves were pawing through an SUV-size mound of garbage. On the ground beside them, a sky-blue tarp had been spread on the ground. In the middle of the tarp, a small lump.

“Hey, Sully,” I shouted over the grunts and squeals from nine hundred tons of breakfast meat on the hoof. “Hope that isn’t what it looks like.”

“Mulligan? You’re not supposed to be here,” he shouted back. “The captain said to send you up to the house.”

“Okay.”

“And tell your photographer to stop taking pictures.”

Gloria dropped her camera, letting it dangle from its strap while I inquired about the well-being of Sergeant Sullivan’s wife and kids. That gave her time to shoot from the hip, sneaking in a few more frames. When she nodded that she was ready, we turned and walked toward the white-shingled two-story house. A few curled brown leaves clung to the red oak that shaded Cosmo’s porch in summer.

“
Your
photographer?” Gloria said. “I hate that. Just once, I’d like to hear you addressed as
my
reporter.”

We stepped onto the wide farmer’s porch and wiped our muddy feet on the Three Little Pigs welcome mat. Gloria stretched out a finger to poke the bell.

“Hold on,” I said.

“What?”

“Let’s see if we can learn something first.”

Captain Parisi’s muffled voice leaked through the door, but I couldn’t make out his words over the symphony of the swine. They butchered the vocals to Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way” and segued into a raucous, off-key rendition of Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love.” But whatever Parisi was saying pushed the pig farmer’s buttons.

“It’s Friday morning,” Cosmo bellowed. “Where the fuck do you think they are?”

Parisi said something else I couldn’t make out. Then Cosmo again:

“In
school,
asshole! They’re in fuckin’ school!”

I caught the sound of a woman’s voice then, and whatever she said seemed to calm Cosmo down. After a few more unproductive minutes of ear strain, I rang the doorbell. A uniformed state trooper with bowling-ball shoulders opened the door, a buff broad-brimmed Stetson clutched in his left hand.

“Sir?” he said.

“This is Gloria Costa, a photographer from the
Dispatch,
” I said, “and I’m Mulligan, her reporter. Captain Parisi left word for us to come up to the house.”

“Wait here,” he said, and shut the door.

“Thank you,” Gloria said.

“You’re welcome.”

We were still waiting there ten minutes later when a satellite truck from Providence’s ABC affiliate raced down the road and screeched to a stop beside the cruiser blocking the drive.

“We’ve got company,” Gloria said.

The driver got out to talk with the trooper, and after a minute or so the conversation grew heated. The hogs were covering a Michael Bolton power ballad now, their version an improvement over the original, but I could see that the TV guy was yelling and waving his arms in frustration. Finally he got back in the van, backed it up, and parked behind Secretariat. The crew climbed out, opened the back doors, pulled out camera equipment, and started setting up behind by the barbed-wire fence.

“Parisi must like you,” Gloria said.

“I’m not sure he likes anybody.”

“Then how come he let
us
up here and not them?”

“Because he knows we’ll get the story right. No dressing it up with space aliens, conspiracy theories, and Angelina Jolie.”

“More company,” Gloria said. Satellite trucks from the NBC and CBS affiliates were coming down the road.

Somewhere nearby, two powerful engines growled to life, giving the hog chorus a bass line. A moment later, a matching pair of Peterbilt garbage trucks with “Scalici Recycling” in red letters on their cab doors lumbered into view from behind the farmhouse. I assumed they were hitting the road for more pig food. Instead, they took a sharp right through the muddy field and rolled to a stop in front of the crime scene, blocking the view of it from the road.

At the end of the driveway, the cruiser moved aside so the medical examiner’s van could rumble through. It rocked its way up the gravel drive, pulled into the field, and stopped ten yards from the garbage pile where the state troopers were still sifting. The door swung open, and Anthony Tedesco, the state’s tubby chief medical examiner, rolled out lugging a large, stainless-steel case. Normally, his assistants did the crime scene work. It took a big case for him to venture out from the sanctity of his morgue.

Gloria snapped a few pictures with her long lens as Tedesco waddled to the blue tarp and knelt beside it. When he peeled it back, she put down the camera, turned her head, and said, “Jesus!”

“Maybe you shouldn’t be on this one, Gloria.”

“And maybe you should shut up and let me do my job.”

I was fishing for a suitable response when the farmhouse door swung open behind me.

“The captain says you can come in now.”

The trooper held the door for us, and we walked through it, following the sound of voices down a short hallway floored with polished bamboo. On both sides, the walls were hung with formal studio photographs of the Scalicis’ pork-fed daughters, Caprina and Fiora. We found Cosmo and Parisi in the kitchen, seated on opposite sides of a retro dinette table with chrome legs and a red cracked-ice Formica top. Both men had empty coffee mugs in front of them. Between them, a heaping platter of biscotti and cannoli.

Cosmo’s wife Simona, slim at the waist and ample where it counted, stood at the granite countertop and measured grounds for a fresh pot. She threw us a look over her right shoulder.

“Make yourselves at home. The coffee will be ready in a few minutes.”

As Gloria and I seated ourselves at the table, I spied six color snapshots on the sculpted steel door of the Sub-Zero refrigerator, all held in place by Miss Piggy refrigerator magnets. Cosmo saw where my eyes had gone.

“Her name was Gotti,” he said. “First sow I ever owned.” Across the room, Simona sniffed resentfully.

“What happened to her?”

“After her breeding days were over, we ate her.”

“Any Gotti left to share with your guests?”

“It was twelve years ago.”

“No leftover chitlins in the freezer, then?”

“We don’t eat the viscera. We feed it to the pigs.”

“Then I’ll settle for this,” I said. I snagged a cannoli from the stack and took a bite. “Fantastic. Did you make these, Mama Scalici?”

“Can’t say I did. They’re from DeFusco’s Bakery in Johnston.”

“Really?” Parisi said. “
That’s
what you want to ask about?”

“Yeah,” I said. “But I do have a couple of other questions.”

“Shoot.”

“Caprina and Fiora safe at school, are they?”

Cosmo slammed his fist on the table so hard, the pastry platter jumped. “You too, Mulligan?” he growled, his face a tomato. “I can’t fuckin’ believe it.”

“Now, Cosmo,” Simona said. “These gentlemen are just doing their jobs. And such language in my house!”

Cosmo was always quick to take offense at any insult, real or imagined. He’d spent his entire adult life trying to prove that pig farmers and garbagemen were as good as anybody else. But no matter how hard he tried or how much money he made, his kids got picked on at school, he and his wife never got invited to the right parties, and he kept getting blackballed at the Metacomet Country Club.

“The girls are fine,” Parisi said. “We called their school to confirm. And young lady,” he said, pointing a finger at Gloria, “put the camera away or we’re done here.”

“So who’s under the blue tarp?” I asked.

“Don’t know.”

“A kid?”

A five-second delay, and then: “Pieces of one.”

“Which pieces?”

“So far we’ve turned up a female torso and a couple of limbs. Tedesco will have to test the DNA to be sure they’re from the same kid.”

“How old?”

“You’ll have to ask him that.”

“He never talks to the press.”

“Not my problem, Mulligan.”

The coffee was ready now. Simona poured us each a fresh mug, took a seat at the table, picked up a string of rosary beads, and wrapped them around her wrists. To me, they looked like handcuffs.

“Who found the body parts?” I asked.

“Joe Fleck,” Cosmo said.

“One of your workers?”

“Yeah. He upchucked his breakfast and then came running for me. I took a quick look and called the captain.”

“Fleck just found the torso,” Parisi said. “My men unearthed the rest in the same garbage heap.”

“That garbage been here long?” I asked.

“Came in on a truck this morning,” Cosmo said.

“Any idea where it was picked up?”

Cosmo started to answer, but Parisi cut him off. “That’s still under investigation.”

“What about the arm from last month? Could it be from the same kid?”

“I can’t talk about that on the record, Mulligan.”

“No?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Why is that?”

Parisi glared at me.

“Okay, off, then.”

“Definitely a different kid.”

“You know that how?”

Five seconds of silence, and then: “The torso’s just starting to decompose. And the two limbs we found today?”

“Yeah?”

“They’re both arms.”

I squeezed my eyes shut. For a moment, no one spoke.

“What the hell are we dealing with here, Captain?”

“Hard to say.”

“A serial killer?”

“Don’t jump the gun.”

“What it looks like.”

“I’m going to ask you not to write that, Mulligan. It would cause a panic. If I see the words
serial killer
in the paper tomorrow, you and I are done.”

“Okay, I’ll play along. But it’s gonna get crazy once the Van Susteren wannabes at the end of the drive get wind of this.”

“From what I’ve seen of their journalism skills,” he said, “that could take a while.”

As it happened, it took only three days.

20

By the time I got to Hopes, Attila the Nun had three dead soldiers on the table in front of her and a fourth in her sights.

“You’re late,” she said.

“Sorry, Fiona. The copydesk was shorthanded, so I got drafted to edit state house copy and just finished up.”

“What’ll you have?” she asked, and waved for the waitress.

“Club soda.”

“Ulcer acting up?”

“It is.”

“Maybe you should give up the cigars.”

“I don’t eat them, Fiona.”

“No, but I read somewhere that they’re bad for what you’ve got.”

“Most good things are.”

“I didn’t see you at the press conference,” she said.

“Lomax had me cover it off the TV.”

“The attorney general holds a press conference to announce that a serial killer is on the loose, and the
Dispatch
doesn’t bother to show up?”

“Appalling isn’t it? But it’s the sort of thing that’s bound to happen after three-quarters of our reporters are given walking papers.”

“Hard to ask questions if you’re not there, Mulligan.”

“Even harder to get answers.”

“Anything you want to ask now?”

“Yeah. Have you heard from Captain Parisi yet?”

“I have.”

“And?”

“He’s mad as hell. Says I’ve turned his case into a quote, fuckin’ circus, unquote.”

“And you said?”

“That parents have a right to know someone out there is butchering kids.”

The operatic theme song for Channel 10 Action News, which seldom offered much of either, burst from the TV set over the bar. Fiona lit a cigarette, and we both turned to watch the teaser.

“Is a serial killer stalking Rhode Island’s children, hacking them to pieces, and feeding them to pigs? We’ll be back in a moment with our exclusive investigative report. You’ll be shocked!”