A Killer Like Me (19 page)

The killer thinks about what the hot-dog vendor said:
I didn’t get too good a look at him, other than he was a white guy . . . Caucasian, I mean, probably in his thirties.

If that’s the best the Lucky Dog man can do, the killer knows he has nothing to worry about. As he heads to the shower, he thinks about the promise he made to the newspaper.

. . . a killing rampage the likes of which this city has never seen.

“What did you say?” Murphy asked.

“I think I saw who set the bar on fire,” the Lucky Dog man said again.

Murphy stared at him for several seconds. The hot-dog vendor got fidgety. He looked down and kicked the toe of a worn-out black sneaker into the sidewalk. Below the short sleeves of his red-and-white–striped shirt, both forearms were covered with tattoos.

“What’s your name?”

“Frank,” the man said.

“Frank what?”

“Smith.”

Murphy shook his head. “Try again.”

“Frank Jensen.”

“If I find out you’re lying I’ll put you in jail.”

The man raised his right hand like he was swearing in court. “Frank Jensen, that’s my real name, sir.”

“All right, Mr. Jensen, what did you see?”

“I’m pretty sure I seen the guy who started the fire.”

“Be specific.”

“Okay,” Jensen said. He pointed toward the corner of Iberville and Royal, where his Lucky Dog cart was parked on the sidewalk. “I was pushing my sled up from Canal, on my way over to Bourbon. Midnight till about four is usually my busiest time, what with all the drunks leaving the bars.”

Murphy made a hurry-up motion with his hand. He wasn’t interested in the ins and outs of the hot-dog-vending business.

Jensen gave a nod of understanding. “So as I’m coming up Royal, I seen a guy standing behind the edge of the building, kind of peeking around the corner. Then right before I get to Iberville, dude spins around and starts to jet off, but he runs into my cart and knocks me ass over teakettle.”

“When was this?”

Jensen held up his left hand. His fingernails were stained with mustard. “I don’t wear a watch.”

“Give me your best guess,” Murphy said.

The hot-dog vendor shrugged. “Probably midnight, maybe a little before.”

“Was the guy actually running, or did he just turn around and bump into you?”

“No, he was running, like he was trying to get away.”

“Was the building already burning?”

“Oh, yes, sir. I could see the flames over the rooftops.”

“Could he have been running to get away from the fire?” Murphy asked.

Jensen shook his head. “No, sir. He looked like he was trying to get away from the policeman.”

“What policeman?”

“A cop . . . a policeman come around the corner a few seconds later.”

“Was the policeman chasing the guy?”

Jensen shook his head. “I don’t think so, but he sure looked like he wanted to talk to the guy.”

“Back up for a second,” Murphy said. “Did you see where he came from?”

“The policeman?”

Murphy rubbed a hand across his face. When he spoke he struggled to keep his voice under control. “No, not the policeman. The guy who knocked you over. Could you tell if he came from Iberville?”

“No,” Jensen said. He pointed to the building next to his cart. “When I first seen him he was standing by that building, just peeping around it.”

“Okay,” Murphy said. “What did he look like?”

“On account of the dark, I didn’t get too good a look at him.”

Murphy stared at the hot-dog vendor.

Jensen cleared his throat. “He was a white guy was about all I could tell.”

“How tall are you?”

Jensen looked confused. “About five-eight. Why?”

“Was he taller than you?”

“A little bit.”

Murphy straightened. “I’m six feet. Was he taller than me?”

The Lucky Dog man shook his head. “Man, I don’t know. I told you it was dark.”

“It’s important.”

Jensen eyed the top of Murphy’s head. “Maybe a tad shorter than you and not as bulky.”

“How old was he?”

“Thirty, forty. I really couldn’t say.”

“How long was his hair?”

“I don’t remember.” Jensen’s voice was starting to crack.

“Did it go past his ears?” Murphy asked. “Was it down to his collar?”

The hot-dog vendor pressed his palms against his temples and shook his head. “I don’t know, man. I take medication. I was just trying to do the right thing. I can’t give you all the answers you want.”

Murphy took a deep breath. It was always the same with witnesses. You had to coax them into remembering, and even then the details they gave you were rarely reliable.

The human brain is an imperfect recorder. Murphy had seen it a hundred times. When you put a witness’s memory up against a surveillance camera, the camera wins every time. The witnesses aren’t lying, not the cooperative ones anyway, but what they recall has been filtered through the subjective lenses of their own emotions, prejudices, and expectations. Where there are gaps, the brain fills them in the best it can, using old memories and associations.

That’s how you get a witness description of Brad Pitt robbing a tourist on Bourbon Street at two o’clock in the morning.

Jensen was trying to help. Murphy had to remember that. The Lucky Dog man wasn’t a trained observer. He was just a hard-luck guy, loaded on meds, who hawked hot dogs in the French Quarter.

“Look, pal, I’m sorry if I seem a little tense,” Murphy said. Then he turned and pointed to the still-smoldering building a block away. “But I’ve spent all morning up there with dozens of dead bodies, all burned beyond recognition. It’s possible you saw the guy who did this, and so far you’re all I’ve got.”

The hot-dog vendor nodded. “His hair came down to about here.” Jensen reached up to his left ear and drew a finger across the middle. “Best I could see it was light brown or blond, and parted on one side.”

“Anything else?”

“Let me think a second.” Jensen closed his eyes.

The description was generic. It fit thousands of men. At some point it might prove useful, Murphy thought, especially if the task force developed a suspect and the Lucky Dog man could put him running from the fire scene, but it didn’t help much right now.

Jensen opened his eyes. “His hair must have been parted on the right because I seen a scar over his right eye.”

Murphy felt a tingling of excitement. “Tell me about the scar.”

Jensen touched his forehead above his right eyebrow. “Right here. A diagonal line, couple inches long, three at most.”

“What did he do after he ran into your cart?” Murphy said.

“He kind of bounced off. He knocked me over but not my sled.” Jensen nodded toward his Lucky Dog cart. “Thing weighs three hundred pounds.”

“Did he say anything?”

“He called me a name.”

“What name?” Murphy asked.

“An old-fashioned name for a . . . homosexual.”

“What did he say?”

The hot-dog vendor scratched his head. After several seconds he snapped his fingers. “A sodomite. He called me a sodomite. Like that town in the Bible where everybody was queer.”

Murphy nodded. In the killer’s letter to the newspaper he had used the biblical word
harlot
to describe his last two victims. The letter also contained other religious references. He sounded like someone who would use an archaic word like
sodomite
to describe a person he thought was gay.

Murphy pulled out his notebook.

Jensen’s forehead wrinkled with worry, but he wasn’t looking at Murphy’s notebook. He was looking down the street at where the Red Door Lounge had been. “You figure he thought I was gay?”

“I don’t think he meant it personally,” Murphy said.

Jensen looked relieved. “I did some time, but, you know, that was prison. I ain’t queer.”

“Give me a phone number where I can reach you?”

The Lucky Dog man gave Murphy his cell number.

“We have a computer program that develops a composite picture based on witness descriptions,” Murphy said. “I want you to work with us on putting together a picture of the man you saw.”

Jensen shook his head. “I don’t want to go to court, not on something like this.”

“You won’t have to go to court,” Murphy said, knowing it was almost certainly a lie. But witnesses had to be coaxed.

“You sure?” The hot-dog vendor looked skeptical.

Murphy nodded. He knew he had to sound convincing. Jensen was an ex-con and knew the system. “When we catch this guy he’s going to have to plead to avoid the death penalty. There won’t be a trial. No trial, no witnesses.”

“All right, then.” Jensen looked relieved. “Long as I ain’t got to go to court.”

“I’ll call you tomorrow,” Murphy said. “And thanks for your help.”

Jensen nodded and shuffled off. A minute later he was pushing his Lucky Dog cart down Iberville toward the burned-out building, toward a bunch of hungry firemen and cops.

Friday, August 3, 9:20
AM

“TV has crushed us on this,” said
Times-Picayune
managing editor Milton Stanford. “It led this morning, it’ll lead at noon, and it’ll lead tonight at six and ten. Meanwhile, we’ve got nothing.”

“It’s on the Web,” Internet editor Harvey Banks said.

Stanford glared at Banks. “That’s great, Harvey, but it’s not in the paper yet, and last time I checked we were still a news-
paper
.”

Kirsten Sparks was one of a dozen editors and reporters crammed into the big conference room. Stanford stood at the head of the table. He had been on a tear for the last twenty minutes, railing against the speed and shallowness of TV news coverage, and also condemning the nickname some of his veteran reporters had given to the Red Door fire, the Big Weenie Roast.

The 8:00
AM
emergency budget meeting was well into its second hour.

“I want a package for tomorrow with every imaginable detail about the Red Door fire and a historical sidebar on the 1973 fire,” Stanford said, his gaze sweeping the room. “I want reaction from the local gay community, a quote from some national gay-rights leader, the latest from the police and fire departments, victim profiles, and I want comparisons of this fire with other big fires around the country, like the Triangle Factory Fire.”

Stanford directed his gaze. “Kirsten, I want you to pump your police sources . . .”

Laughter broke out from the nearly all-male crowd.

Kirsten felt her face flush. She knew it was involuntary, an autonomic response, the result of her damn female hormones. She couldn’t care less about the guys’ sexual innuendos and wisecracks. Newsrooms were newsrooms, and no amount of time-wasting, expensive sensitivity training was going to change that. If you wanted to swim with sharks, you had to learn to bite.

Stanford’s face was red. “Kirsten, I didn’t say that intentionally as some sort of . . . I . . .” Stanford was a boss. In this era of political correctness, he had to be careful not to say anything that might offend anyone. One slip could cost him his career.

Kirsten threw him a lifeline. “Milton, please. No apologies are necessary. Truth is, I’ve seen a few of the dicks in this room and they’re worth a good laugh.” That wasn’t true. She hadn’t slept with any of the reporters or editors in the room, but they didn’t know that.

There was some uncomfortable chuckling but it died quickly.

Back to business. Kirsten arched her eyebrows. “What were you saying, Milton?”

“I want to know if the fire investigation, which the coroner says involves at least seventy homicides, is going to draw resources away from the serial-killer investigation.”

City editor Gene Michaels spoke up. “Could they be connected?”

“What do you mean?” Stanford said.

Kirsten knew that Gene had once been an investigative reporter for United Press International. He had a good nose for news.

Michaels laid his hands on the table and leaned back in his chair. “If we accept that the letter we received is legitimate, and given what accompanied it, I don’t think there’s any doubt, then the killer’s musings have a pseudoevangelical theme. For instance, he used the word
harlot
, he said he was doing the Lord’s work, and he called himself the Lamb of God.”

“What’s your point?” Stanford said.

“My point,” Michaels continued in his distinctive Southern drawl, “is that a lot of evangelicals have a problem with homosexuality, and I’m just wondering if this guy set that fire in order to fulfill the threat he made to kill a whole bunch of people if we didn’t publish his letter.”

“Wait just a damn minute,” Stanford said. “Are you suggesting that our decision not to publish this guy’s letter was enough to cause him to set a fire that killed seventy people?”

“He’s not a rational person,” Michaels said. “He’s a psychotic. And I’m not saying he did it. I’m just saying the possibility is worth—”

Stanford snapped his focus to Kirsten. “You’re our serial-killer expert. What do you think?”

She shrugged. “Like Gene was saying, it’s worth looking into. What are the odds that we have a prolific serial killer
and
the biggest mass murderer in the city’s history running around at the same time and they’re not connected?”

Stanford dropped into his chair and rubbed his chin. “That’s something I doubt TV will have.” He looked at Kirsten. “Get on it.”

At 5:30
PM
, Murphy and Gaudet, along with the two detectives assigned to the new serial-killer task force—Joey Dagalotto and Danny Calumet—were seated at a table in the back of Felix’s Oyster House on Iberville at Bourbon, two blocks from the fire.

Close enough to smell the ashes.

The fried-oyster po’ boy Murphy had just eaten sat in his gut like a wet sleeping bag.

Murphy and Gaudet had spent fourteen hours at the fire scene. They had helped carry out seventy-three bodies wrapped in black rubber bags. Dr. Maynard had found two more victims in a bathroom.

“You think we’ll catch him?” Calumet said.

Despite his promise of a six-man task force, Captain Donovan had only given Murphy two extra detectives, both young, both inexperienced, both on loan from the burglary unit. Neither had ever worked a homicide before.