A Killer Like Me (29 page)

Ten minutes later, Kirsten walked into the
Times-Picayune
library. The cramped two-room office lay buried in the basement, where broken office furniture and broken down journalists came to die.

For more than a century, reporters had called the place where newspapers kept indexed records of old stories the morgue, but time and the inexorable creep of political correctness had forced the industry to change the name to library. Kirsten wasn’t sure why the PC police had demanded the change. She guessed it was the same reason why the familiar yellow road signs that warned of a dead end had been replaced by signs that read
NO OUTLET
. Maybe the dead were easily offended.

She preferred the name morgue. It fit the funeral-parlor atmosphere of the place.

Pam Elder, the
Times-Picayune
librarian, sat at her desk in the middle of the windowless room. She was in her midfifties, heavy, with pasty white skin. She looked like she was about to have lunch, two Twinkies and a can of Diet Coke. “What brings you down here?” she said.

“The archive server is down, and I need to search for some old stories.”

“I can pull them from the backup system,” Elder said before she bit off half a Twinkie.

Rumor was that Elder had once been a reporter, but for nearly two decades she had been in the basement, hidden away like some crazy old aunt. In her dank office, stacks of old newspapers occupied nearly every flat surface, and file cabinets stood against every foot of wall space. Piled on top of the cabinets were reference volumes of almost every kind, as well as telephone books, maps, and old city directories. A film of dust overlaid everything.

The adjoining office was a storeroom, crammed with horizontal files of newspaper clippings and drawers filled with reels of microfilm. Not much of it was used anymore. The newspaper had been archiving stories electronically for twenty years, and online references had superseded those printed on paper.

“What are you looking for?” Elder said.

“Two murders in the French Quarter that happened at least a year ago, maybe as far back as two years. Both unsolved, both probably involving gay men.”

Elder polished off the first Twinkie and wiped her hands on a paper napkin. “I thought you were on the serial-killer story.”

“I am,” Kirsten said, a little surprised Elder kept up with the outside world. “I think the killer may have murdered two gay men before he started killing prostitutes.”

The librarian bit into her second Twinkie and washed it down with Diet Coke she slurped through a red and white straw. Then she slid the can and the rest of the Twinkie aside and pulled her keyboard closer. “Let’s see what we’ve got on file.”

Kirsten walked around the librarian’s desk to get a view of her computer screen.

“What search parameters do you want to use?” Elder asked.

“Set the date range from two years ago to one year ago,” Kirsten said. “Search for the words
killing
,
homicide
, and
French Quarter
. Let’s see what that comes up with.”

The librarian typed in the data and hit the enter key.

A few seconds later, the search returned more than one hundred stories. The list of headlines was sorted by date, the most recent stories first.

Elder rolled her chair back a little and took another pull from her Diet Coke as Kirsten leaned closer to the screen to scan the headlines.

“That’s a lot of stories to read,” Elder said.

“Add the word
gay
to the search.”

That cut the list to twenty stories.

A headline near the bottom of the screen caught Kirsten’s eye:
MURDERED PRIEST SAID TO HAVE BEEN GAY
.

Kirsten tapped a fingernail against the screen. “Pull that one up.”

When Elder clicked the hyperlinked headline, the story opened in a separate window. The article was a follow-up about a Catholic priest found murdered in a hotel room in the French Quarter. The story was dated eighteen months ago.

Homicide detectives found hundreds of gay pornographic videos in the rectory of Saint Patrick Catholic Church Tuesday as they searched the private living quarters of the Rev. Ramon Gonzalez.

The nude body of Gonzalez, a Cuban immigrant, was found last week in a French Quarter hotel room. Coroner’s officials said the popular priest had been stabbed at least 40 times . . .

Kirsten remembered the story well. She had not written anything on it—she had been covering a high-profile criminal trial at the time—but she recalled how it had rocked the city to its foundation. New Orleanians were well-known for their frivolity and their attitude of
laissez les bon temps rouler
, let the good times roll. But they were serious about three things: Mardi Gras, Saints football, and the Catholic Church.

She also recalled being glad not to be covering the story when she found out the newspaper and the police department had entered into an uneasy alliance to protect the Church’s reputation.

In the first few stories the
Times-Picayune
ran on the murder, there had been no mention that Father Gonzalez had been found nude or that sex toys and used condoms had been scattered around the room, along with several all-male skin magazines. The newspaper only mentioned the gay-sex angle after the hotel maid who discovered the body started talking to the TV news.

But the killer had been caught.

“Can you print that story and then run the priest’s name in quotes?” Kirsten asked.

The librarian sent the story to the laser printer that sat on a two-drawer file cabinet next to her desk. Then she reconfigured the search parameters.

Eight stories showed up on the screen. The oldest was from a few months before the murder. Judging by the headline, it looked like a puff piece:
LOCAL PRIEST’S TRIP RECALLS YOUTH UNDER COMMUNIST RULE
.

“Pull that one up,” Kirsten said.

The story was about Father Ramon Gonzalez’s trip back to his native Cuba as part of a delegation of American priests sent to the island nation during the pope’s visit two years ago. Ramon had come to the United States at the age of eight, strapped to a raft with his father. His father’s plan had been to earn enough money to smuggle his wife and daughter out. Instead, he drank himself to death a few years later.

The trip back to Cuba as part of the papal visit had been Father Ramon’s first since he floated away on a leaky raft nearly thirty years before. His mother was dead, but he reunited with his sister. The story was a touching one, and the
Times-Picayune
had sent a reporter to cover the trip.

A few months later, a hotel chambermaid found Father Ramon murdered, his naked body tied to a bed, surrounded by gay porn and dildos.

Kirsten took over Elder’s mouse. She went back to the search-results page and clicked the top story, the most recent one. The headline read,
ACCUSED PRIEST KILLER HANGS SELF
.

Just as she thought, the police had arrested the suspected killer, a nineteen-year-old homeless man who had been found carrying the priest’s wallet. After charging the suspect with first-degree murder, the DA announced he was going to seek the death penalty.

Before the case went to trial, though, the judge, a devout Catholic, granted the defendant a lunacy hearing. To no one’s surprise, after a two-day hearing the judge ruled that the accused killer was not mentally fit to stand trial and shipped him off to the state funny farm in Jackson, a hundred miles from New Orleans.

Two weeks later the kid hanged himself in the shower.

It fit, Kirsten thought. The wanton brutality of the murder of a gay priest could easily have been the work of the killer who called himself the Lamb of God and who had set fire to a gay nightclub.

There was no telling how the priest’s wallet had fallen into the hands of a homeless, probably half-crazy teenager.

One down, one to go.

Kirsten clicked the print icon, then backed away from the desk. She could tell Elder was feeling crowded. “Can you run the second search again, the one with the word
gay
in it?”

Elder typed the key words into the search box and jabbed the enter key.

The same results page came up that listed the first story Kirsten had seen about the dead priest. She leaned forward and laid a hand on the mouse again. As she scrolled through the headlines, nothing jumped out at her. “Do you mind if I go to the next page?” Kirsten asked.

The librarian shrugged as she rolled her chair out of the way and took a pull on her Diet Coke.

Kirsten clicked the right arrow at the bottom of the screen. Another page of headlines came up. A third of the way down the screen, she saw the headline
POLICE SAY “STREET HUSTLER” KILLED IN QUARTER.

Kirsten clicked the link.

The story was about a gay French Quarter prostitute who had been stabbed to death in Pirate’s Alley, the narrow pedestrian thoroughfare that runs along the west side of Saint Louis Cathedral. The story was dated six weeks before Father Ramon Gonzalez’s murder.

Still leaning over the librarian’s desk, Kirsten printed the story and then typed the victim’s name into the search box. There was only one follow-up story, a short piece dated a week after the priest’s murder, speculating on whether the two cases might be connected. As far as Kirsten could tell from the archives, no arrest had ever been made.

She printed that story too.

Kirsten spent another fifteen minutes browsing headlines, but she didn’t see any references to other killings that seemed to fit what the serial killer had described in his letter.

She stood up and pulled the stories off the printer.

“Did you find what you were looking for?” Elder asked as she rolled her chair back under her desk.

“I hope so.”

As Kirsten walked out, Elder was devouring the last of her Twinkie.

Sunday, August 5, 1:25
PM

Marcy Edwards was right where Murphy had left her twelve hours before, lying facedown on her bathroom floor.

“What do you think?” Gaudet said.

Squeezed into the doorway next to Gaudet, Murphy didn’t answer. All he could do was stare in horror at what he had done, at the lifeless flesh, the torn nightgown, the letters drawn in blood.

Murphy had to breathe through his mouth so he wouldn’t smell the sickly sweet odor of decomposition that filled the small bathroom.

“I don’t think it was him,” Gaudet said.

Murphy’s gut tightened. “Why not?”

“Because he wrote the letters on the floor instead of cutting them into her skin. It’s not sick enough.”

“He wrote them in her blood.” Just saying it made Murphy feel sick.

“Still . . .”

“He’s only carved his signature into two victims.”

“The last two,” Gaudet said. “You told me yourself, these guys always ratchet up the violence. This dude cuts people’s heads off. He’s not scared of carving this woman up like a Christmas turkey. So why write on the floor?”

Murphy knew he had to sell this scene as the work of the Lamb of God Killer to give himself any chance of staying out of prison. “Maybe he didn’t have a knife.”

“The kitchen is full of knives,” Gaudet said. He took a step forward and leaned closer to the body. “He kidnapped Sandra Jackson and the mayor’s daughter. Why strangle this one at home?”

“He strangled Carol Sue Spencer at home,” Murphy said.

“Then he used a knife on her, a kitchen knife. So why didn’t he do something like that here?”

“He got scared away,” Murphy suggested. “The phone rang, a car slowed down outside, a neighbor’s door opened.”

“He still had time to write in her blood.”

Images flashed through Murphy’s mind: Rolling Marcy Edwards onto her stomach. Lifting her nightgown to expose her soft white skin. Clutching his knife.
Almost
cutting her. Then dipping his finger in her blood and writing on the cold floor.

“It didn’t take long to write that,” Murphy said.

Gaudet looked sideways at him. “How the hell do you know how long it takes to write something in blood next to a dead woman?”

“It’s three letters,” Murphy mumbled. He was eager to change the subject, to get back to selling this scene as the work of the Lamb of God. “The cause of death looks like strangulation. That fits with the others.”

Gaudet squatted beside the body. He pointed a gloved hand at bruises on the sides of Marcy Edwards’s neck. “The bruising doesn’t form a circle. Looks like manual strangulation, not that . . . cinch strap.”

“Cable tie,” Murphy said. The smell of the blood was making him sick.

Gaudet stood up. “The MO doesn’t fit. Whoever did this got off on squeezing the life out of her with his hands.”

Murphy inhaled a deep breath through his mouth. The air tasted like copper on the back of his tongue. His stomach was doing flip-flops. “I’ve got to get some fresh air.” He bolted toward the kitchen.

The back door was blocked by a crime-scene tech, hunched over the lock, snapping pictures of the pry marks. Murphy spun around and rushed out the front door. When he reached the end of the porch, he bent over and threw up on the flower garden.

After he finished, Murphy wiped the back of one hand across his mouth, then instinctively fished in his jacket pockets for his cigarettes. A smoke would at least mask the taste in his mouth. When his hands came up empty he remembered he had left the nearly empty pack in his car. He glanced around, trying not to make eye contact with the neighbors staring at him from beyond the yellow crime-scene tape.

Half a block to Murphy’s right, squatting on his haunches near the middle of the street, was another crime-scene technician.

Near where I was parked last night.

The tech looked away when Murphy caught his eye, probably embarrassed to see a veteran homicide detective puke at a murder scene.

Unable to see what the man was doing, Murphy stepped off the porch and walked across the yard. The presence of the crime-scene tech so close to where he had parked last night was unsettling.