A Killer Like Me

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

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.

Relax, he told himself.

As he got closer, Murphy saw that the tech was using a pair of tweezers to pick at a pile of cigarette butts, then dropping them one by one into a brown evidence envelope.

Murphy’s heart started fluttering.

Those are my cigarette butts.

He flashed back to last night, to the hours he had spent sitting in his car watching Marcy Edwards’s house, smoking cigarette after cigarette. Half smoking them really, then tossing them out the window. Into a nice neat little pile.

“You must really be jonesing for a smoke,” Murphy told the crime-scene tech, “if you’ve got to pick butts up off the ground.”

The tech looked up. He was a young black guy, thin like a cross-country runner, wearing a dark blue crime-scene jumpsuit. “I was walking the outer perimeter,” the tech said, “and I ran across this pile of butts. Could be the killer sat here watching the house while he worked up his nerve.”

“That’s good work.”

Those cigarette butts have my DNA on them.

Murphy glanced over his shoulder at the house, then back at the tech. “They’re kind of far from the scene. You sure you want to waste your time processing those?”

The tech dropped the last cigarette into the envelope. He stood up. “I don’t mind. If it turns out to be nothing, it still gives us another profile. If the guy didn’t do this, maybe he did something else, or maybe he’ll do something in the future and we’ll already have his profile in the database.”

The database.

The state DNA database was really two systems: the offender database and the forensic database. DNA samples taken from state prisoners went into the offender database. DNA evidence recovered from crime scenes went into the forensic database, the entire contents of which were regularly run against the DNA profiles in the offender database. That technology routinely produced cold-case hits on crimes that were years, even decades, old.

Murphy realized that after today his unidentified DNA profile would be in the forensic database, just waiting for a chance match with the profile of Sean Patrick Murphy. He knew he wasn’t in the offender database, but just the thought of his profile-a profile linking him to a murder-residing forever in a state computer system made him break out in a cold sweat. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and mopped his forehead.

“You all right?” the crime-scene tech asked.

Murphy shook his head to clear it. “Yeah, I’m fine. Actually, I just came over to bum a cigarette.”

“I don’t smoke,” the tech said.

“Good for you,” Murphy said as he turned around and walked away.

Trudging back toward the house, he imagined a few nightmare scenarios that could lead to his DNA being matched to the DNA in those cigarette butts.

Although most of the profiles in the offender database came from convicted felons, some of them came from people who were only suspects or mere persons of interest. Some of that DNA was obtained by court order, the rest by consent. And all of it got dumped into what the state had dubbed the offender database.

Sometimes policemen landed in it.

A hundred and fifty miles west of New Orleans, a serial killer had murdered eight women in and around the small town of Jennings. Local suspicions that the killer was a law-enforcement officer were so strong that the sheriff ordered every deputy and policeman in the parish to submit a DNA sample so he could quash the rumors hanging over the case.

An even more likely scenario was that some bumbling detective or crime-scene tech would spit on the floor or cut his finger and compromise the integrity of the Marcy Edwards crime scene. Then the rank would order everyone who had worked the scene to submit a DNA sample for elimination.

And it wasn’t just this scene he had to worry about, Murphy realized. It could be any crime scene he worked from now until the end of his career.

Son of a bitch.

Kirsten sat at her desk and stared at the TV mounted on the wall above the newsroom. The five o’clock news was on.

Channel 6 meteorologist Maggie Gallegos was standing in front of a map of the Gulf of Mexico. The sound was off, but Kirsten could tell by the look on the face of the tall, aging redhead that she was nervous. Gallegos was famous for her on-air meltdown the year before Katrina, when, as Hurricane Ivan bore down on New Orleans, she shouted into the camera, “It’s too late to get out. We’re all doomed!” The storm turned at the last minute and wrecked Alabama.

The television map showed the eye of Hurricane Catherine, a cat-four monster, already well into the gulf and driving hard toward New Orleans.

“I thought the storm was still near Miami,” Kirsten said to the reporter in the next cubicle.

“Huh?” came the man’s reply.

Kirsten could only see the top of his head. “The hurricane,” she said. “I thought it was heading to Miami.”

“It barely touched Miami,” the reporter said. “Since then it’s picked up a lot of speed. The computer models are projecting a path straight for us.”

The phone on Kirsten’s desk rang. She picked it up. “Sparks.”

“What did you find in the morgue?” Gene Michaels said.

“Bodies.”

The city editor laughed. “I guess I asked for that.”

“Father Ramon Gonzalez,” Kirsten said.

“The priest who got killed in the French Quarter?”

“Whoever wrote the letter either killed him or is trying to take credit for it.”

“But the police caught the guy who did that,” Michaels said. “It was some gutter punk.”

“The case never went to trial. The kid hanged himself.”

“Anything else?”

“A gay street hustler got stabbed to death next to Saint Louis Cathedral six weeks before Father Gonzalez.”

“Jesus.”

“I doubt it,” Kirsten said. “He’s got an alibi.”

Gene Michaels let out another short laugh. “Seriously though, you think this guy has something against the Catholic Church?”

“I don’t know,” Kirsten said.

“We can’t say he’s claiming to have killed either one, since the letter is so vague.”

“But we can say that while we were researching the letter we found two cases that seem to match the murders the killer described.”

“Okay, write up a sidebar to go with the letter story,” Michaels said. “Space is tight, so no more than ten inches.”

“What about reaction from the bishop, former parishioners, maybe the homeless kid’s family?”

“We’ll work on that for Tuesday. The budget for tomorrow’s front page is absolutely full. We’ve got the story about the letter, your piece on the kidnapping, your French Quarter sidebar, and, of course, the storm.”

“Who’s writing the letter story?”

“Milton.”

Kirsten was surprised. It was unusual for the managing editor to write anything other than an editorial. She was also disappointed. A story about the newspaper receiving a letter from the serial murderer who kidnapped the mayor’s daughter was going to be the top story. “As lead reporter on the serial killer, I should be writing that story, Gene.”

“Remember what I told you about the big chiefs and the little chiefs?” Michaels said. “Well, he’s a big chief. By the way, I need your stories by eight o’clock.”

Kirsten glanced at the clock on her computer screen. It was 5:10. Deadline wasn’t until 9:00. “Why so early?”

“They extended the production deadline and authorized overtime for everyone in the printing plant, but they cut the copy deadline.”

“Why?”

“Tomorrow’s cover package is huge and the design people need extra time putting it together.”

She realized she would not have had time to write the story about the killer’s letter anyway. Still, it bothered her that she wasn’t being allowed to write it. Focus, she told herself. Focus. She had a short deadline. “What did you get from the security camera?”

“Nothing but a man in a big floppy hat dropping off an envelope.”

“Can you see his face at all?”

“He kept his hat in the way.”

“Can you tell his race?” Kirsten asked. “His age? What about his clothes?”

“Slow down,” Michaels said. “I’ll e-mail you the clip, but keep it to yourself. The legal department is all over this story, and they don’t want to see the video on YouTube.”

“Is Milton going to mention the video in his story?”

“Definitely not,” Michaels said. “All he’s going to say is that the letter was dropped off at our office this morning, but we don’t know by whom.”

The new-mail indicator at the bottom of Kirsten’s screen appeared. “Your e-mail just came in,” she said.

“Eight o’clock,” Michaels said.

“Yes, boss,” Kirsten said, then hung up.

She opened her e-mail program and clicked on the video file.

The black-and-white image showed an exterior view of the front door of the building. A time stamp at the bottom of the screen read

10:35 AM.

A man wearing a Hawaiian shirt and a straw hat appeared on the screen. The brim was pulled low to conceal his face. His right hand held an envelope. Beside the double glass door was a mail slot. It was a holdover from the days before faxes and e-mail, when people used to drop off letters to the editor and anonymous tips at all hours of the night.

The man slipped the envelope into the slot as if he were returning a DVD to Blockbuster; then he turned around and walked away. He kept his head angled so the brim of his hat was between the security camera and his face.

He was on screen for less than five seconds.

Kirsten replayed the video at a slower speed. She followed the movement of the letter, from when it first appeared on screen to when it disappeared down the mail slot. She noticed the white skin of the man’s forearms and the gloves on his hands.

She closed the video player. She had less than three hours to finish two stories. Her hands reached for her keyboard.