A Killer Like Me

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

Sunday, August 5, 11:05 PM

It was raining hard when Murphy finally made it home. According to a radio report he had heard in the car, the storm was moving much faster than any of the computer models had predicted. One news commentator said the mayor had waited too long to pull the trigger on the city’s first evacuation since Katrina.

As soon as Murphy unlocked his apartment door, his cell phone rang. It was Mother.

“Where have you been?” she screeched in his ear, sounding drunker than usual. “They’re evacuating the city. When were you going to tell me?”

He pushed the door open with his foot and stepped over an envelope lying on the floor just inside the threshold. He stared down at it, only half listening as his mother continued her rant.

When she paused for breath, he said, “Everything is all set, Mother. I called the manager, Mr. Dugas, today. He has three buses lined up to take everybody to Baton Rouge.”

“I don’t want to ride on a bus full of old people,” she said.

The envelope on the floor had Murphy’s name typed on the front. Just his name, not his address.

“It’s only eighty miles, Mother.”

“I don’t care if it’s eight miles or eight hundred miles. I have a son. I shouldn’t have to take a bus to Baton Rouge.”

Murphy set his briefcase down and picked up the envelope. It was thin, just a single sheet of folded paper inside. His name had not been printed from a computer. It had been typed with a typewriter.

“… are you listening to me?”

He hadn’t been. “Mother, I’m a detective. I’m trying to catch a serial killer and find the mayor’s kidnapped daughter. I don’t have time to drive you to Baton Rouge.” He flipped his phone closed and walked into the kitchen.

Glancing across the bar into the den, he saw the empty Knob Creek bottle on the coffee table, and the sofa on which he had sat just twenty hours ago, alternately throwing back gulps of whiskey and jamming the muzzle of his pistol in his mouth.

His phone rang. Mother again. He flipped the phone open and jammed his finger on the ignore button. He laid the envelope on the counter and stared at it.

What could it be? Shoved under his door like that, with no address on it. An eviction notice? A rent increase? No. It smelled more sinister than that.

And from whom?

His landlord? One of his neighbors? Had he made too much noise this morning during his drunken, suicidal binge? Did he rattle the walls with his Warren Zevon songs?

Murphy knew what the envelope contained and who it was from.

He picked it up by its edges. From his right front pocket he pulled his folding knife. He thumbed the blade open and sliced through the envelope’s flap. Using the tips of his fingers, he slipped the typed letter out. He unfolded it and used the envelope to press the page flat on the kitchen counter. My Dear Detektive Murphhy: This is the Lamb of God speaking. first let me say that i am an admirer of yourrs. you are a worthy opponennt and the only one who recognizzed my work, though you have only scratched the surface. regarding wingate, you and i know that i did not kill marccy edwardds. you have SCRUPULOUSLY kept my signature-log-hidden from the public. imagine my surprise today (sunday) when I heard i had left my “telltale signature” at this most recent “crime scene.” I don’t know what “game” you are playing, but did you really think you could “pin” that on me? shame, shame, detektive. i admirre your ENTHUSIASM but your work is sloppy. how did it feel, by the way, to take her life, to watch it drain from her eyes? your faithful servant, log p.s. i hope you were careful-no fingerprinTts, no fiberrs, no dnna! p.p.s. we really should get togethher. i sense a kindred spirrit. you are a killer like me.

Murphy read the letter a second time, his eyes lingering over the postscripts.

He knows it was me.

That didn’t make sense. How could he possibly know?

Murphy’s head was spinning. He opened the refrigerator and found an Amstel Light hidden in the back, behind a curdled half gallon of milk. Fumbling through the utensil drawer, he found a bottle opener and pried off the top. After a long sip, he read the letter a third time.

Misspellings notwithstanding, what did the letter mean? Why had the killer not mentioned the mayor’s daughter, currently the highest-profile crime in the country? Just Wingate. And what did he mean when he said that Murphy had only scratched the surface? Were there more bodies, earlier victims? Murphy had always suspected there were.

The letter was addressed to him and hand-delivered to his apartment. Clearly it was a warning, but to what end? Did he really think that scaring off one detective would stop the investigation, stop the search for Kiesha Guidry?

Standing at the kitchen counter, Murphy gulped down the rest of his beer. He thought about those cigarettes, packed with DNA from his saliva. He thought about the letter’s last two lines: “I sense a kindred spirit. You are a killer like me.”

What the hell did that mean?

We’re nothing alike. The Lamb of God is a murderous psycho. I’m a homicide detective. My job is to catch killers… except when I strangle a woman and try to frame someone else for my own crime. But I didn’t mean to kill her. I was trying to catch a murderer, not become one.

The killer might suspect, but he couldn’t know. He couldn’t.

But what happens if when he is caught the killer decides to talk? When Gillis was arrested in Baton Rouge he spilled his guts about the women he had murdered. But he was also adamant about the ones he did not kill. Those cases stayed open.

What could the Lamb of God say? That he strangled more than half a dozen women, beheaded one, kidnapped the mayor’s daughter, and burned more than seventy people to death. But he didn’t kill Marcy Edwards? Detective Murphy killed her.

Who did he think was going to believe him, especially with his initials scrawled in Marcy Edwards’s blood?

PIB would believe him.

At least enough to check out his story. Quietly of course, but thoroughly.

The cheese eaters would not have to look far to find enough inconsistencies between the Edwards case and the others to fuel their suspicions. Marcy Edwards’s killer had used his hands to strangle her, not a cable tie. The letters were drawn on the floor, not carved into her flesh. And what about the time line? Would the Lamb of God Killer have had time to murder Marcy Edwards and kidnap the mayor’s daughter on the same night? Or was it more likely that the discrepancies between the two cases meant the Edwards murder was a copycat crime?

And what about the DNA on the cigarettes outside Marcy Edwards’s house, waiting like nails to be driven into Murphy’s coffin? Maybe an oral swab during the autopsy had picked up even more of his DNA left behind during his failed attempt to resuscitate her.

PIB would ask for a DNA sample to exclude Murphy as a suspect. Murphy could refuse, but that would focus even more suspicion on him. Eventually, the Rat Squad would get a search warrant and force him to give up a sample. When the DNA came back a match, what would he say?

I thought she might be the next victim, so I was staking out her house the same night someone broke in and murdered her. Then I found her in the bathroom and performed CPR.

What if when the serial killer was caught he decided not to talk? What would happen then? Eventually, the case would go to trial. In preparing for that trial, the DA’s office would pressure Murphy and the task force for every shred of evidence. The crime lab would certainly compare the suspect’s DNA to the DNA found in the cigarettes. The Wingate murder would be exposed as the work of a different killer, and the case would remain unsolved and open.

Because of the telltale “LOG” signature, someone might suspect that Marcy Edwards’s killer may have had inside information from the investigation. Maybe the killer was a cop.

New Orleans had a history of killers with badges. Antoinette Frank, Len Davis, Weldon Williams-all convicted of murder. Two of them handed death sentences. So how much of a stretch would it be to imagine the department ordering every cop who had worked the Wingate crime scene to provide a DNA sample? Just like in Jennings.

The killer, no matter how many times he was convicted and how many death sentences he got, would sit on death row at Angola through more than a decade of appeals, all the while holding on to a secret that could land Murphy in prison.

But what if he were killed instead of caught? Shot down like John Dillinger as the police closed in to arrest him. Then there would be no trial, thus no pressure to tie up every loose end, to dot every i and cross every t. As part of its standard operating procedure, the police department would issue a final report on the investigation and stamp it “closed.”

The Homicide Division, specifically, the task force, and even more specifically, Murphy himself, would be in charge of writing that final report. The Edwards murder could be added to the other serial-killer crimes as little more than a footnote.

I have to kill him.

But how? Dillinger at least had the decency to run when Melvin Purvis and his team of G-men tried to arrest him outside the Biograph Theater in Chicago’s Lincoln Park, back in the days when it was accepted practice to shoot fleeing felons in the back. Now, that was out of bounds. By today’s rules, Purvis would have ended up in prison, and Dillinger’s family would have gotten rich from a lawsuit against the government.

Serial killers don’t go down in a blaze of gunfire.

Bank robbers do. Matix and Platt killed two FBI agents and wounded five more in Miami in 1986 before being shot down. In North Hollywood, Phillips and Matasareanu shot ten cops and wounded seven civilians in 1997 before going down for the count.

Religious fanatics do. Jim Jones and his cult followers murdered a U.S. congressman and three reporters in Guyana in 1978 before Jones and nine hundred of his disciples killed themselves by drinking cyanide-laced Kool-Aid. In Waco, David Koresh, a Jesus wannabe, and his band of freaks killed four ATF agents and wounded a dozen more during a two-and-a-half-hour shootout in 1993 before burning themselves to death.

But not serial killers. Serial killers are cowards. When they get cornered, they don’t fight like lions. They lie down like lambs.

The idiot who called himself the Lamb of God would likely lie down the same way. And right now, Murphy’s two junior detectives, Calumet and Dagalotto, the two least likely to succeed, were probably closing in on him.

Somehow Murphy had to slow them down. He had to find the serial killer first and kill him. Maybe the storm would help.

Twenty hours ago, Murphy had been sitting on his sofa with a pistol in his mouth trying to work up the nerve to kill himself. Now, he was standing in his kitchen plotting to kill someone else.

He glanced down at the killer’s letter again and focused on the last line.

You are a killer like me.