Chapter 80
CHAPTER
Two hours later, john Sampson and I were at the Pennsylvania state police barracks in Coatesville, a long, low brick-faced affair surrounded by leafless bushes. John and I were on the phone with Chief Pittman while Tommy French was on another line with his supervisor.
“An arrow to the chest?” Pittman said. “That had to hurt, Cross.”
I had thought he’d be angry that I’d been caught with my guard down. Relieved, I said, “I have a whopper of a bruise on my chest, and my ego’s a bit crushed, but I’ll be all right, sir.”
“Good, good,” Pittman said. “Are we ready to announce this? That we got the Bulldog killer and maybe the strangler? Or should we call them the white-van killers?”
Sampson said, “Give us a chance to talk to them first, sir. Both have lawyered up, but we’re going to tell them what we found in the double-wide, see if that will pry something open.”
“Anyone searching Beech’s place?”
I said, “French sent a team right after we took him into custody.”
“Keep me posted.”
“We’ll call as soon as we know something,” John promised and hung up.
French finished his conversation, and a sergeant led us all to a hall outside an interrogation room. The sergeant knocked, leaned his head in. “Detectives would like to talk to you, Ms. Cox.”
A few moments later, Emelie Cox, Diggs’s public defender, exited the room and crossed her arms. “My client says he accidentally shot one of you.”
“Me,” I said. “For the record, he whistled at me and heard me identify myself as a cop before he shot me. It was no accident.”
Cox, a petite redhead in her thirties, said, “Hear him out. To clear up whatever you think he’s done, he says he’ll answer your questions unless I tell him not to.”
In the interrogation room, Diggs looked across the table at me with an agonized expression. “Look, man, I’m sorry. I did not mean to shoot you.”
“But you did!” Sampson said, slamming his hand on the table. “You shot him. If it hadn’t been for his vest, my partner would be dead now.”
Diggs cringed like a kicked dog. “I admit I saw him coming through the woods. Saw the pistol. I did not know what to think. I came to full draw on a guy roaming around the woods with a pistol. Who knew what he wanted?”
He turned to me. “You got to understand that there are people out there who want to kill me for some of the things I’ve done in the past.”
“I could see that,” I said. “But why did you pull the trigger on me if you didn’t mean to shoot me?”
His head bobbed. “See, that’s the thing. There is no trigger. I had what’s called target panic when I used a trigger release, so now I use a back-tension release. You had to have found it near my bow.”
French said, “I’m sure we did. So what?”
Diggs said the back-tension release was a mechanical device with small jaws that attached to the nock of the bowstring.
The system was engineered to release an arrow only after the shooter pushed hard enough against the bow handle with the left arm and pulled back hard enough with the muscles of the right shoulder to, in effect, pry open the jaws.
He stared at me. “Honest to God, when you said you were a cop, I remember thinking I’d better let down. So I shrugged, you know, like, Okay, he’s not a threat. But then the bow just went off, man. I had no idea it would do that. I would never intentionally shoot a cop. Ever.”
French was having none of it. “How about the bomb booby trap at your farm? How about all the pot and blow we found in your trailer? How about the blasting caps we found in your shed? Stolen from Keegan’s Granite, along with dynamite, no doubt.”
“What?” Diggs said, sounding frightened. “No. No, that’s BS.”
Cox, his lawyer, put her hand up in front of him. “No more, Mr. Diggs.”
Sampson said, “We almost died earlier today when we triggered the bomb you set up on the dirt road to your grandmother’s old place.”
Diggs, ignoring his attorney, shook his head violently. “No. Absolutely not. I haven’t even been down that way in months, and I sure as hell didn’t booby-trap anything there. Is that what this is about? Is that why you were out looking for me?”
“You’re here because of the murders you committed,” French said.
Diggs said, “Murders? Me? No way.”
Cox again put her hand in front of her client. “Don’t say a thing, Mr. Diggs.”
Sampson said, “We’ve got you, you puke. We’ve got your white Ford Econoline van out at the farm.”
His attorney said, “What white van?”
Diggs squinted. “You mean my grandfather’s old junker? Doesn’t even run.”
“Oh, yes, it does,” I said. “And it’s impounded. The best crime techs in Pennsylvania are all over it. We’ve already found the piece of scalp you cut off one of your victims and a shell casing from the forty-four-caliber bullet you put in her head.”
Diggs said, “Hey, hey, man, I don’t even own a gun.
I can’t own a gun. I am a convicted felon and the only thing I can have is a bow.
That’s all I have. And I don’t know where the drugs and those blasting caps came from.
Other guys at Keegan’s, other ex-cons, lived there before me. Lots of guys just out of the stir.”
“Mr. Diggs, please,” his attorney said.
I said, “Okay, Eamon, let’s say you’re telling the truth. You never meant to stick an arrow in me, and you don’t own a forty-four.”
“Didn’t and don’t.”
I nodded. “But what about your friend? What about Harold Beech? Did he know about the farm? The van?”
Cox stood up. “Detectives, we’re done.”
Diggs sighed, then said, “Why don’t you ask Harry? On the advice of counsel, I’m shutting my yap.”