A Killer Like Me

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Sunday, August 5, 11:50 AM

As soon as Kirsten Sparks got back to the Times-Picayune ’s offices on Howard Avenue, she walked straight to Gene Michaels’s cubicle. The city editor was hunched over, staring at a sheet of paper on his desk, his reading glasses resting on the end of his nose.

“How did it come in?” Kirsten asked.

Michaels swiveled in his chair and looked up at her over the top of his glasses. “Through the mail slot.”

“When?”

“The sports editor found it in the drop box an hour ago.”

“Any postage?”

Michaels shook his head.

“That means the killer hand-delivered it,” Kirsten said.

“Or somebody did it for him.”

“We have a camera at the door.”

“Milton is downstairs with security right now going over the video.”

Kirsten pointed to the letter Michaels had told her about when he called her away from Murphy’s press briefing. “What’s it say?”

He handed it to her. “That’s a copy.”

She read the latest letter from the Lamb of God Killer.

When she finished, she looked at Michaels. “It’s obvious it’s not a crank. The writer uses the same k ’s for hard c ’s and the same double-consonant pattern as the first letter.”

“I agree.”

“What about the two murders in the French Quarter he mentions?”

“Go down to the library and pull every French Quarter homicide story for the last two years,” Michaels said. “Concentrate on unsolved cases-”

“I can do that from my desk.”

Michaels shook his head. “The archive server is down. The IT department said they would fix it tomorrow, but with this storm… who knows? Pam can access the backup system.”

Kirsten shrugged. She didn’t like the cramped world of the basement library, but she put the thought out of her head. She had to focus on the story, the biggest of her career. “This letter is news, Gene. If we’re still calling ourselves a newspaper, we need to run it.”

“Redfield is meeting with Darlene and the legal department right now.”

“What about NOPD?”

“That’s one of the things they’re discussing.”

“We haven’t notified them yet?” Kirsten said.

The city editor shook his head.

“They’re going to want to test the letter and the envelope for DNA, fingerprints, fibers, whatever is possible to get from paper,” Kirsten said.

“You know what I know, and that’s that the big chiefs are talking about it. I’m just a little chief.”

“Can you imagine how the mayor is going to feel when he reads this?” Kirsten said.

Michaels nodded. “I know.”

Everyone in the city, and since Katrina, nearly everyone in the country, knew about the mayor’s habit of making asinine off-the-cuff remarks. Several times his comments had gotten him into trouble. But this time, it looked like Mayor Ray Guidry’s mocking comments were going to get his daughter killed.

Kirsten scanned the letter again. “It seems like he’s laughing about the cipher, like he either knows we can’t crack it or…”

“Or it doesn’t mean anything,” Michaels said.

“What do you think?”

Michaels shrugged. “Phil Grady on the people desk was a communications specialist in the navy. He knows something about codes. He took a look at it, but I don’t think he got anywhere.”

“The cops sent it to the FBI,” Kirsten said, “but it takes months to get anything back from them. And that’s only if it’s a real code.”

Michaels’s phone rang. He picked it up and listened for about thirty seconds. Then he said, “Okay,” and hung up.

He turned to Kirsten. “That was Redfield. We’re going to run the letter tomorrow.”

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.