A Killer Like Me

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Friday, August 3, 7:15 PM

Kirsten Sparks hung up her phone and glanced at the clock on her desk. There was less than two hours until deadline. She got up and walked to Gene Michaels’s cubicle. The city editor was banging away on his keyboard, editing stories for tomorrow’s paper. He peered up at Kirsten over the top of his reading glasses.

“The serial killer started the Red Door fire,” she said.

Michaels just stared at her.

“Did you hear me, Gene? You were right. The Lamb of God Killer just added seventy souls to his body count. This is huge.”

Michaels glanced at his watch. “Who’s your source?”

“That’s the problem.”

“What?”

“I’ve got one source but no confirmation,” Kirsten said. “A guy at the coroner’s office said Murphy’s task force has taken over the Red Door investigation.”

“Did you call Murphy?”

“He won’t answer,” Kirsten said.

“Does he know we’re running a profile on him tomorrow?”

“No.”

“Why not? Didn’t you write that story as a mea culpa for getting him kicked out of Homicide?”

“Of course not,” Kirsten said, although that was exactly why she wrote it. The puff piece was her way of apologizing to Murphy for the hammering he took for coming forward with the serial-killer story. “We don’t apologize for reporting the news.”

“Too bad,” Michaels said. “I hear he’s a good detective. Be a shame if our story wrecked his career.”

Kirsten didn’t want to talk about Sean Murphy, especially not with her boss. “What about the Lamb of God and the fire?”

“If we’re going to break that story in the morning, we need a second source.” The city editor looked at his watch again. “Within the next hour.”

“I’ve got calls out to everybody I know, but all I’ve got so far is an official denial from the police department. My source was at the scene, though. He saw Murphy running the investigation. We’ve at least got enough to mention a possible link between the fire and the serial killer.”

“I’ve got to go to Milton on this,” Michaels said. “Meanwhile, keep working your sources. If you get confirmation we’ll put it on A-1 and shove it up TV’s ass.”

Taking the woman alive was easier than the killer thought. One touch with the stun gun. Some duct tape around her ankles, arms, and wrists. Then a pillowcase over her head.

He can hear her in the trunk, her cries muffled through the tape covering her mouth.

Driving down Saint Claude Avenue, the killer enters the neighborhood known as Bywater, part of the Ninth Ward, a section of New Orleans made infamous by constant TV news coverage after Katrina that showed eight feet of water in the streets and people stranded on rooftops. But that was the Lower Ninth Ward, on the other side of the Industrial Canal.

On this side of the canal, the flooding was less severe, and in the five blocks between Saint Claude and the river there had been no flooding at all.

Bywater is a maze of single-lane, one-way streets. The killer turns right on Bartholomew, then threads his way through the neighborhood, eventually stopping beside a two-story building on Burgundy Street at the corner of Mazant.

The clapboard-sided building is more than a hundred years old and was once a grocery store. The front door is built into a corner and faces the intersection of the two streets. A first-floor overhang, supported by wooden columns, covers both adjacent sidewalks.

The killer pulls his Honda to the curb on the Mazant side, just past the driveway that runs behind the building. He gets out of his car and approaches a pair of wrought-iron gates that enclose the end of the driveway. The gates are chained together and secured with a padlock. He opens the lock and pushes aside the gates. Then he backs his car into the driveway, stopping just a few feet from a door that leads into the rear of the building.

It’s almost midnight. The driveway is shrouded in darkness.

The killer pulls a nylon gym bag from the backseat and sets it next to the building’s rear door. Then he stands a few feet behind the car and unlocks the trunk. As he expected, the woman is a coiled spring. She lashes out with her feet, but because her ankles are taped together she has no leverage.

In his right hand the killer grips his stun gun, its nylon lanyard looped around his wrist. He steps forward and jams the electric contacts against the woman’s exposed thigh. He triggers the device and watches as she convulses hard, her muscles locked in an agonizing spasm that lasts several seconds.

The killer engages the safety on the stun gun and shoves it into his front pocket. He steps over to the gym bag and pulls out a plastic water bottle filled with a clear liquid. Holding the sixteen-ounce bottle at arm’s length, he twists off the cap. He can smell the powerful fumes.

The woman lies on her back, moaning and twitching. She is clothed only in a short pajama set, bright orange boxer shorts and a matching tank top. The pillowcase covering her head is cinched around her neck with duct tape. Her wrists are taped together in front.

The killer steps closer, holding the plastic bottle out in front of him. He moves his hand, centering it over her face. Then he tips the bottle and spills a little bit of the ether onto the pillowcase.

He steps back and screws the top on quickly, afraid of the effect the fumes may have on him. For a moment, the woman seems revived. She struggles against her bonds and twists her head from side to side. He hears her take a deep breath and hold it, but her pathetic attempt to avoid the fumes filling the pillowcase is already too late. The deep breath she took was filled with ether, and by holding it in she is merely accelerating the passage of the gas from her lungs into her bloodstream, and then into her brain.

Within sixty seconds she stops moving. Unconscious, not dead, the killer hopes. He has never used ether before and is unsure of the dosage. His first thought was chloroform. He has seen it used in movies and on television a thousand times, but while searching the Internet for a chloroform supplier, he stumbled upon an article about diethyl ether.

According to his research, doctors began using ether as a general anesthetic in the mid-1800s, nearly two decades before the Civil War. Modern medical practitioners, particularly in Western countries, have long since replaced ether, which is highly flammable, with safer anesthetic agents, but developing countries still use it because of its reliability, its low cost, and its high therapeutic index-the margin of safety between an effective dose and a lethal one. Currently, ether is used mainly as a laboratory cleaning solvent and by hophead kids for a cheap high, and to some extent, by homeopathic healers and alternative-medicine types.

The killer found a homeopathic medical supplier on the Internet that sells ether. Although the supplier doesn’t sell to individuals, it was simple enough to set up a corporate account for a bogus homeopathic store with a Mid-City address. He bought the pint of ether for twenty dollars and had it delivered to his door by UPS.

His captive is small: five feet three inches, perhaps 115 pounds. He selected her partly because of her size-he knew he was going to have to carry her-and partly for who she is and what she has done.

She is a thirty-two-year-old civilian employee of the New Orleans Police Department Crime Laboratory whose husband filed for divorce last year. In his lawsuit, the husband said his wife had been unfaithful to him. She had moved out of their marital home and was shacked up with a policeman. The couple has two children, whom the cheating wife has left in the custody of her cuckolded husband.

Capturing her was fairly simple, though the killer was nervous at first. There was nothing to picking up a prostitute on the street. That was easy. Even getting a woman to open her door to a well-dressed stranger in the middle of the afternoon hadn’t been difficult. But snatching a woman late at night from her home and taking her with you, that was a challenge.

But with God’s help, he met that challenge.

The killer waited until the boyfriend drove away, probably for work, in his black Ford Crown Victoria that looked very much like an unmarked police car. After the woman went to bed, he used a foot-long screwdriver to pry open the back door. He worked quickly and made no attempt at stealth.

Then he concealed himself in the den and waited. Within seconds, the woman stumbled out from her bedroom to investigate the noise of the break-in, wearing nothing but pajamas and carrying a small pistol. As she passed him, the killer jammed the stun gun into her neck and pressed the trigger. Then he trussed her up and threw her into the trunk of his Honda. Since he knows nothing about guns and has no need for them, he left the pistol on the floor where it had fallen.

At Mazant and Burgundy, the killer lifts the unconscious woman out of the trunk and lays her across his shoulders in a fireman’s carry. Standing at the back door, already straining under the weight, he stoops to retrieve his gym bag, then unlocks the door and steps inside the dark building.

The door opens onto a small foyer tucked beneath a wooden staircase. Beyond the foyer is a large open room. Straight across is a kitchen and a bathroom. Diagonally across, to the killer’s right, is an open doorway leading to a second room, almost as large as the first. On the other side of that room is the front door. There is no furniture.

Last year, the killer saw a flyer advertising the building for rent for two thousand dollars a month. With two big open rooms on the ground floor and living space upstairs, including bedrooms, a bathroom, and a small galley kitchen, the flyer billed the property as ideal for a pair of artist’s studios. Or since there was also a full-sized kitchen downstairs, as a large, single-family home with an open floor plan.

The killer had another idea for the property. After settling on eighteen hundred dollars a month, he handed the owner a check for the deposit and the first month’s rent.

With the woman slung across his shoulders and his gym bag hanging from one hand, the killer trudges up the stairs. By the time he reaches the top, his legs are burning. He drops both the woman and the bag to the hardwood floor and leans against the wooden railing to catch his breath.

A central hallway runs the length of the second floor. Along the hall are five rooms: two bedrooms and a bathroom on the left, and two slightly larger bedrooms on the right. An open space surrounds the top of the stairs. Near the stairs is the kitchenette.

Leaving his bag behind, the killer grabs the woman’s ankles and drags her down the hallway. He pulls her into the first bedroom on the right.

The walls are completely covered with old mattresses, nailed into place to provide crude but effective soundproofing. Across the room, a set of French doors look out over Mazant Street. The glass panes have been coated with thick black paint.

On the right side of the room sits a single wooden chair. Directly opposite the chair, along the left-hand wall, stands a tripod with a video camera mounted to it. There is nothing else in the room.

The woman moans as the killer lifts her into the chair. She is waking up sooner than he expected. Next time he must remember to use more ether. He rushes from the room to the top of the stairwell and retrieves his gym bag. Back in the room, he sets the bag on the floor and pulls out a coil of black parachute cord and a KA-BAR combat knife.

His captive begins to move. The killer hurries. He cuts the tape from around her ankles, then uses lengths of parachute cord to tie her legs to the front of the chair.

Next, he slices through the tape binding her wrists. Although her hands are free, she can barely move them because he has wound a long strip of tape around her chest and upper arms, cinching her elbows to her sides. The killer ties her wrists to the chair arms. He then uses a long piece of cord to lash her upper body to the back of the chair.

She leans forward and he hears her retch inside the pillowcase. Nausea and vomiting are common side effects of ether. She will drown in her own vomit if he doesn’t remove the gag from her mouth. He rips the tape from around her neck and pulls the pillowcase off her head. Her eyes are open but unfocused. Using his fingernails, he peels a corner of the tape away from her mouth, then yanks off the rest. He steps back as she throws up again.

When she finishes retching, her head slumps forward onto her chest.

The killer stares at her.

A few minutes later, she shakes her head, trying to clear the effects of the ether. But she is only partially conscious, not yet aware of the horror that awaits her. The killer’s eyes dart around the room, at the mattresses nailed to the walls, at the window panes painted black. He has created his own type of artist’s studio, a private killing room.