A Killer Like Me (2 page)

“A local girl?”

The sergeant shook his head. “Tourist. Her boyfriend reported her missing yesterday. He said they were having sex on that old pier up by the zoo. Somehow she fell in. I guess she couldn’t swim.”

Murphy nodded, then remembered the sergeant couldn’t see him. “Thanks,” he said. Another hour inside a sauna with a rotting corpse. By law, even Homicide couldn’t move a body until the coroner’s investigator got to the scene.

He and Gaudet went back to examining the victim. She was black, twenty to twenty-five years old, and badly swollen. Her tongue was the color of chocolate syrup. Her eyes were open and bulging out of her face. The whites had turned dark from the burst blood vessels.

Textbook strangulation.

The ligature mark, the bruising left by whatever had been used to choke her, looked like it encircled her neck. When the coroner’s investigator got here, the three of them would roll the body and check, but Murphy was betting she had been strangled with a cable tie. Scabs and needle marks pockmarked the woman’s arms and legs. Three of the fingernails on her right hand were broken. She had put up a fight.

She fit the pattern of the others. Six previous murders in twelve months, all young, all prostitutes, all victims the department brass referred to as “women with high-risk lifestyles.” All but the first victim had been strangled with a heavy-duty cable tie, a thick plastic band with a one-way ratcheted lock that tightened but didn’t loosen. The only way to remove a cable tie was to cut it off.

“What are you thinking?” Gaudet said.

Murphy shook his head to clear it. He had been staring down into the dead girl’s blood-soaked eyes, but there wasn’t anything behind them. Everything she had ever been, every dream she ever had, every memory—good, bad, or ugly—was gone.

“Hey, partner,” Gaudet said, “don’t get too wrapped up in this shit. It’s just another case.”

Murphy looked up. “You think the rank will finally admit it?”

“Your serial-killer theory?”

“I think we’re past the theory part.”

“Brother, you had me convinced after the third one,” Gaudet said. “But I’m not in charge. I just work here.”

“I’m going to talk to the captain again. We need a task force. We need resources. If we don’t catch this guy, he’s going to keep doing it. He’s going to keep killing women.”

Crime-scene techs snapped pictures of the dead woman and the inside of the bar. They measured how far the body was from fixed objects around the room and from the back door at the end of the short hallway that led to the restrooms. They plotted the distances and directions on a diagram. Seventy-eight feet separated the back door from the woman’s body.

While everyone waited for the coroner’s investigator to show up, Murphy managed to talk one of the techs, a middle-aged black woman who he guessed weighed about 130 pounds, into letting him drag her around the bar. Murphy paced off eighty feet of empty floor. He dragged her one way, then the other.

“Not this method-acting shit again,” Gaudet said as he watched Murphy hauling the crime-scene tech around by her ankles.

Murphy stopped. He was breathing hard. “I’m telling you, it works. You get inside a person’s head and you can figure out how and why he does what he does.”

“How do you know he dragged her? Maybe he carried her.”

“They call it deadweight for a reason,” Murphy said. “If he choked her unconscious while they were outside, he had to get her in here somehow. Lifting and carrying an unconscious woman by yourself is a lot harder than it looks on TV.”

Gaudet grinned. “Have you carried around a lot of unconscious women?”

“If you don’t believe me”—Murphy pointed to the crime-scene tech lying at his feet—“try carrying her from the back door to here.”

The tech shook her head as she climbed to her feet. “That’s enough of this bullshit.” She began banging her palms on the back of her blue utility pants. “I didn’t know this place was so dirty.”

Gaudet ignored her. “Maybe the killer and the victim walked in together.”

“Maybe,” Murphy said, “but I don’t picture our guy as a smooth talker. Not like Ted Bundy. I picture him as shy around women. I think he approached her on the street, told her what he wanted. He showed her some money and they made a deal. Then he led her to the back of the building where they could take care of business. But he choked her or slugged her with something and he dragged her in here, unconscious.”

“How did he know he could get into the building?”

“He’s a planner,” Murphy said. “He probably took the door off the hinges long before he ever approached her.”

The crime-scene tech finished dusting herself off and gave Murphy a disgusted glare. “You owe me a new pair of pants if I can’t get these clean.”

Murphy turned to her. “Can you check the hinges and the pins on the back door for fresh tool marks?”

“Did you hear me about my pants?” she said. When he didn’t answer, she stomped off toward the back door.

It was almost five o’clock when the coroner’s investigator showed up. By that time Murphy was so hot he had stopped sweating. From his Boy Scout days he seemed to remember that was one of the signs of heat exhaustion or heat stroke . . . heat something.

The coroner’s investigator examined the woman’s body by flashlight. He started with her scalp and began working his way toward her toes. He stopped halfway. Murphy, who was looking over the investigator’s shoulder, saw the tip of a dark object protruding from the woman’s rectum. “What is that?” Murphy said.

The investigator angled his head down for a better look. “I don’t know.”

“Guess.”

The man flicked at the object with a latex-covered fingernail. It clinked. “Sounds like glass.”

“Glass?”

The investigator probed with his finger, then nodded. “It feels like a bottle.” He cast a quick glance around the abandoned bar. “Probably a beer bottle.”

“An entire bottle?” Murphy said.

“That’d be my guess,” the coroner’s man said. “The tapered neck would make insertion easier, but we’ll have to wait until the autopsy to remove it.”

“That’s a new twist,” said Gaudet, who stood behind Murphy. “None of the others had anything like that done to them.” He paused for several seconds. “You still think it’s your guy?”

“He’s not
my
guy,” Murphy said. “He’s
our
guy.”

“You know what I mean.”

Murphy stared at the dead woman and nodded. “It’s him. He’s getting off on causing more pain. That’s why the cable tie is gone. He cut if off so he could keep her alive while he tortured her.”

“He must have left something behind,” Gaudet said. “He either raped her, or jacked off on her, or licked her, or just jizzed on the floor. One way or the other, though, he had to have left behind some DNA.”

“Don’t you think he knows about DNA?” Murphy said.

“Maybe he’s not a
CSI
fan.”

“He hasn’t left any yet.”

Gaudet pointed to the body. “He’s never done this before, either. You said he’s getting off on what he’s doing.”

“We’ll see,” Murphy said, though he didn’t believe they would find any DNA evidence. This killer was too smart for that.

Gaudet shifted his feet. He looked uncomfortable.

“What’s wrong?” Murphy said.

“When are you going to talk to the captain?”

“As soon as we get back to the office.”

“He shot you down twice already. You keep fucking with him, he’s going to see to it you get fired . . . again.”

Murphy gazed around the filthy, abandoned bar. Then he stared again at the dead woman. “Maybe,” he said. “But I’ll do whatever it takes to catch this son of a bitch.”

Tuesday, July 24, 8:00
PM

“Whatever you’ve got to say, Murphy, say it quick,” Captain Michael Donovan said as he stood behind his desk, packing his briefcase. “I’m on my way home.”

Murphy and Gaudet squeezed into their commander’s office, a converted closet in a corner of the cramped Homicide Division, which was itself jammed into a corner of the police academy on City Park Avenue.

Since Katrina, the homicide cops had wandered like Bedouins, first working out of a commandeered cruise ship, then out of a pair of trailers in City Park, and finally from a set of cluttered rooms at the police academy.

A pair of Goodwill chairs stood in front of Donovan’s desk, but he did not ask the detectives to sit down.

Murphy cleared his throat. “I need resources, Captain. Money, investigators, support staff, enough for a task force.”

“A task force?” Donovan said. He dug a fingernail into a small sore on his head. He was nearly bald but tried to disguise it by keeping his remaining hair buzzed close to his scalp. “Are you still beating that dead horse?”

“Captain, there’s a serial killer out—”

“Bullshit,” Donovan barked. “The murders you’re talking about are unrelated and were committed by different perpetrators.” He sounded like he was reading from a departmental press release.

“How the hell can you say that?” Murphy snapped. “You haven’t been to even one of the crime scenes.”

“Watch your mouth, Detective,” Donovan said. His boozer’s nose was flushed. “I’ve read all the reports and I’ve seen all the photos. It’s obvious these cases were not the work of the same killer.”

Murphy glanced at his partner, standing beside him like a silent, 260-pound Buddha. “You got anything to say?”

Gaudet rolled his eyes. “I’m going to let you two crazy Irishmen fight it out.”

Murphy took a deep breath. Sometimes his partner’s lack of passion for the job infuriated him. He stared back across the desk. “Captain, these cases are linked, and the killer is getting more vicious. This time he kept the victim alive in order to torture her before she died.”

“You don’t know that,” Donovan said. “Any additional injuries the killer inflicted on the victim could have been postmortem.”

“She bled when he shoved a beer bottle into her rectum, something she would not have done had she already been dead. He’s starting to get off on hurting them, and he’s sped up his pattern.”

“There is no pattern,” Donovan said. “These cases aren’t connected.”

Murphy plunged forward. “The first six were roughly one every other month. Today is only the thirty-fifth day since the last killing. The next one will be even sooner.”

A blanket of silence settled over the room.

Murphy finally broke it. “We need a task force. This guy is not going to stop killing until we catch him.”

“Your time line is a load of crap,” Donovan shouted. “There has never been a serial killer in New Orleans, and we sure as hell aren’t going to have one on my watch.”

“The Axman.”

“What?”

“There was a serial killer here known as the Axman.”

“What are you talking about?”

“He attacked more than a dozen people and killed at least six of them,” Murphy said. “All with an ax. He even wrote a letter to the
Times-Picayune
and gave himself a name—the Axman.”

“When did this happen?” Donovan demanded.

Murphy cleared his throat. “The first attack was in 1911. The last one was in 1919. Officially, he was never caught.”

Donovan waved a hand at him like he was swatting a fly. “Get out of here. Even if that story is true—which I highly doubt—it’s ancient fucking history.”

“I need a task force to catch this guy,” Murphy said.

Donovan jabbed a finger in Murphy’s face. “Do you think me or anybody else in this police department gives a rat’s ass what you need? There is no serial killer, Murphy. There’s just a bunch of whack jobs, or psycho johns, or some other sick fucks. These girls were whores, for Christsakes. It’s a dangerous occupation. Mostly they get fucked, but sometimes they get killed. It’s been happening since the first whore sold the first piece of pussy.”

Donovan pointed to the door. “Now get out of my office and go solve some of these goddamn cases before I transfer your ass out of here and get myself a real detective.”

“Thanks for backing me up, partner,” Murphy said.

He and Gaudet were holding down a couple of stools at the Star & Crescent on Tulane Avenue, across from the courthouse.

Officially, the widow of a slain police officer owned the Star & Crescent, but two brothers, an NOPD armed-robbery detective and a U.S. Customs agent, were the real owners. The bar was popular with cops, assistant DAs, defense attorneys, and judges.

Gaudet shook his head. “Just because Donovan’s all over your white ass doesn’t mean I want him all over my black one.”

“Don’t try to play the race card with me, you mulatto motherfucker,” Murphy said. “You’re only half black.”

“Then I don’t want the captain on either side of my ass,” Gaudet said. “The black one or the white one.” He took a long pull from his Budweiser. “If you keep messing with Donovan, he will do just what he said, and that is transfer your pasty white Irish ass out to the Seventh District with Danny Scanlan, and the two of you can spend your nights doing what Scanlan has been doing for two years—pushing a squad car around and shooting at hogs and alligators and shit.”

“To hell with Donovan. I’ll go over his head to the assistant chief if I have to.”

“The assistant chief hates you too.”

“Somebody on the command staff has to be smart enough to realize that we need to put together a task force to catch this psycho before he starts getting serious.”

Gaudet drained the rest of his beer. “Killing seven sisters ain’t serious enough for you? You waiting for him to kill a white woman?”

“At least we’d get our task force.”

“You racist motherfucker.”

“You know I don’t give a shit what color they are,” Murphy said, “but I’m telling you, this guy is just getting warmed up.”

The bartender, an off-duty Fourth District cop, set a fresh pair of longnecks down in front of them.

Gaudet took a gulp from his right away. “How the hell could you possibly know what he’s going to do?”

“I study these guys. I read about them. More times than not, their behavior follows a pattern. This guy’s attacks are starting to come more frequently and they’re getting more violent.”