A Killer Like Me

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

Monday, August 6, 5:45 PM

The driveway in front of 127 South Saint Patrick Street was empty. Murphy circled the block looking for an old Honda Civic with a new set of Goodyear Aquatreds. There wasn’t one.

He parked across the street, in the back lot of Saint Anthony of Padua Catholic Church. He watched the house until six o’clock. There was no movement and no change in the lighting. It didn’t appear anyone was home.

Murphy was reaching for the glove compartment when his cell phone rang. The caller ID showed Restricted. It was either a police number or it was Kirsten. He pressed the ignore button. He pulled the hood of his raincoat over his head and cinched the drawstrings. The rain was coming down in sheets.

His police radio crackled. “Homicide Division to twenty-five fifty-four, Detective Murphy.”

It was Calumet’s voice. Murphy picked up his radio and keyed the microphone. “Twenty-five fifty-four, go ahead.”

“Call the office ASAP,” Calumet said.

Murphy set the radio back on the seat and grabbed his cell phone. He dialed the main number for Homicide.

Calumet answered on the first ring. “Murphy?” The young detective sounded excited.

“Yeah.”

“Can you get back here by six fifteen?”

Murphy glanced at his watch. That was in less than fifteen minutes. “Why?”

“For a briefing.”

“What briefing?”

“We got the search warrant.”

“What!” That was impossible. They couldn’t have done everything he had told them to do.

“Yeah, we got the warrant.”

Murphy took a deep breath. He had to sound like a detective who wanted to arrest the most prolific killer in the city’s history. “How?”

Calumet’s voice dropped to a whisper. “The captain overheard me and Doggs talking about putting together a warrant, and he asked what kind of information we had. Once we laid it out, he told us to leave off all the murders except the dump job in the east, the one where you found the tire track. He said that’s the only one we need to link Jeffries to right now.”

And the captain is right, but that doesn’t help me.

“You got it signed already?” Murphy said.

“Doggs is on his way back from the judge’s house right now. The judge lives uptown, on the river side of Saint Charles, said he rode out Katrina and he’s going to ride out this one.”

What a fucking disaster, Murphy thought. “I’ll head back,” he said. “Wait until I get there to start the briefing.”

“This is awesome, huh?” Calumet said.

“Yeah, awesome.” Murphy pressed and held the end button to disconnect the call and to turn off his phone. Then he switched off his radio.

From inside the glove compartment, he pulled out a zippered black leather case about the size of a pen and pencil set. The case held his lock-picking tools. Several years ago, the department had sent him to Miami to attend a weeklong lock-picking course. Sometimes when you were executing a search warrant or an arrest warrant, it was better to sneak in than to smash your way in.

He pulled on a pair of latex gloves.

When Murphy opened the car door, a gust of wind nearly ripped it from his hands. The wind was driving the rain down at a forty-five-degree angle, hard enough to sting his face.

There were lights on inside the main house, but the apartment was dark. Jeffries’s mother had probably left the lights on to deter looters, except that in a couple of hours there wasn’t going to be any electricity to power the lights. Last time, it had taken three months to get the power back on in most of the city, longer in New Orleans East.

The homes on either side of the Jeffries house looked empty too. Murphy approached the sliding glass door at the front of the apartment by walking up the left edge of the driveway, next to a low brick wall that separated the Jeffries’s small patch of yard from the one next door. He was glad he was wearing a dark-colored civilian raincoat and not his NOPD jacket with POLICE in reflective tape across the back.

After a glance up and down the street, Murphy pulled a pin rake and a tension wrench from his leather case and crouched in front of the lock. He worked both tools simultaneously for five minutes, but he couldn’t get the lock to spring open.

All of his training had been on standard door locks and dead bolts. The glass door had a lock similar to a file cabinet. In theory, it should work the same as any other lock, but it didn’t. He changed to a different rake. Then he tried a pick.

Nothing worked.

He looked at his watch. It was already 6:15. How long would Doggs and Calumet wait for him before they gave up and came on their own? He had to search the apartment before the task force showed up. There had to be something in here that would lead him to Jeffries.

Murphy jogged back to his car. He opened the trunk and pulled out his tire iron.

The glass door had an aluminum frame that was a little loose in the jamb. Murphy forced the beveled tip of the tire iron between the frame and the jamb, just above the lock. The door was designed to slide to the left along tracks at the top and bottom. Murphy snapped the tire iron to the right and broke the lock apart. He pushed the door open a couple of feet and stepped through. A heavy drape hung across the doorway. Murphy shoved it aside, then slid the door closed behind him.

The apartment wasn’t completely dark. The drape had concealed a light coming from a back room. Murphy felt like shouting “Police,” which was what he usually did when he entered a house looking for a murderer. But this was different. He didn’t say anything.

He pulled down his rain hood and stood still, listening, his right hand gripping the butt of his Glock. Nothing moved inside the house. Murphy reached back and pulled the drape closed, leaving only a narrow gap through which he could see the street. He laid the tire iron on the nearby bed and drew his pistol. Then he slipped a flashlight from his raincoat and crept forward.

The apartment was small, a front bedroom, a short hallway with a bathroom on the left, and a kitchen in the back. There was no doorway connecting the apartment to the main house. Nor was there a back door. As he suspected, no one was home. Murphy holstered his pistol. He gave the kitchen a quick search but found nothing that connected Jeffries to the Lamb of God murders.

The hallway was narrow and bare, with a low ceiling that gave the entire apartment a claustrophobic feel.

Murphy stepped into the cramped bathroom. The vanity, the toilet, and the shower stall were squeezed into a space no bigger than six feet by six feet. Standing at the sink, he pulled open the mirrored door to the medicine cabinet and dug through the pill bottles and assorted junk. He found nothing. Behind the bathroom door was a linen closet with two doors, one above the other. The lower door had an old-fashioned laundry-chute hatch built into it.

Murphy checked his watch. It was 6:30. He was already fifteen minutes late for the briefing. Doggs and Calumet had probably started without him. They would be here soon.

He opened the upper door to the linen closet. Four shelves that began at waist height and rose to the ceiling held bath towels, hand towels, and washcloths. On the top shelf was a green mesh bag stuffed with beach gear: a pair of flip-flops, a sand bucket, a plastic shovel, a tiny fishnet, a cheap diving mask and snorkel.

Murphy closed the upper door and pulled open the one below it. Behind the lower door was a clothes hamper, piled half-full of dirty clothes and towels. He kicked at the pile with the toe of his shoe. There was something hard under it. He bent down and pulled out the clothes and towels. Beneath them was a shoe box. He lifted the lid and shone the beam of his flashlight into it.

Inside the box were locks of hair, swatches of clothing, women’s jewelry, and a gallon-sized zippered plastic bag containing a decomposing human hand with one finger missing. The hand belonged to the dead prostitute under the Jeff Davis overpass. The killer had cut off both her hands and kept one. Murphy had found the evidence he needed to prove that Jeffries was the Lamb of God, but he hadn’t found Jeffries.

He put the lid back on the shoe box. The task force needed to find the evidence that confirmed Jeffries was the serial killer. If Jeffries had been home, Murphy would have shot him. Simple as that. Then he would have put a kitchen knife in the killer’s hand and claimed self-defense.

His story would have been that he had been running late, so he decided to skip the briefing and meet the raid team on South South Patrick Street. When he arrived, Jeffries was coming out the door and spotted him as he drove past. Jeffries then ducked back into his apartment, probably with the intention of destroying evidence or escaping out the back. Murphy had no choice but to pursue. When the suspected killer came at him with a knife, Murphy shot him. With Jeffries dead, what had really happened on Wingate Drive would die too.

Case closed.

Not now. Jeffries wasn’t home. Murphy looked at his watch. It was 6:40. He knew he had only minutes left until one of his fellow homicide detectives smashed a steel battering ram through the front door. He shut the linen closet, turned out the light, and walked down the hall to the front of the apartment.

The bedroom was neat, almost obsessively so, but confined. Bookshelves took up most of the wall space. To Murphy’s right, wedged between the queen-size bed and the front wall, was a small writing desk. On top of the desk sat an old typewriter. Murphy stepped closer. The machine was a Royal, beat-up but serviceable. On the desk next to the typewriter was a short stack of copy paper, on top of which lay a pair of white cotton gloves. Murphy was sure the crime lab would link this typewriter to the killer’s letters.

Beneath the desktop was a single, shallow drawer. Murphy pulled it open and found it full of office knickknacks. Pens, pencils, a writing tablet, paper clips, rubber bands, pushpins, and a tube of glue-exactly the kind of things you would expect a person to keep inside a desk. He closed the drawer and looked at his watch again. It was 6:45. He glanced through the narrow strip of glass between the drape and the wall. The rain had slackened.

The raid team Donovan had cobbled together wasn’t going to roll up to the front of the house in the division’s rattletrap van. The detectives would park at least half a block away and try to sneak up to the door. It was conceivable that the first inkling Murphy would have that the team had arrived was the sound of the door shattering.

He felt the first sour taste of panic well up in his throat.

A shelf above the desk was lined with books on serial killers. Richard Lee Jeffries was a student of murder. On that same shelf stood a five-by-seven-inch frame holding an old black-and-white photograph of a young woman with long dark hair and dark eyes. She bore a striking resemblance to Carol Sue Spencer and Sandra Jackson. And to Marcy Edwards. Instinctively, Murphy knew the woman was Richard Jeffries’s mother.

A flash of light outside caught Murphy’s eye. Turning back to look through the door, he saw headlights shining along the street. Then the lights went out. He heard a car door open. Then the sound of a van’s sliding side door banging back against its stops. The raid team was here. They would be at the door in thirty seconds.

Murphy glanced around the bedroom, desperate to find something, anything that would lead him to Jeffries. He saw a corkboard hanging on the wall behind the desk. Pushpins held business cards, notes, a sheaf of coupons, and other scraps of paper. Pinned to the bottom of the board was a utility bill. Murphy’s eyes were drawn to three lines in the top left corner of the monthly statement:

Service Location

4101 Burgundy Street

New Orleans, La 70117

The four-thousand block of Burgundy Street? That was in Bywater. Why would Richard Jeffries have a utility bill for an address in Bywater? From outside came the sound of the van door sliding closed.

Murphy looked at the utility bill again. The account was in the name of Richard Jeffries. The due date was next week. Murphy yanked the single sheet of paper off the corkboard. The pushpin flew across the room and bounced off the floor. As he sprinted toward the back of the apartment, he shoved the bill into his raincoat pocket. He left the tire iron on the bed. There was no way to trace it.

In the kitchen were two windows: a small one in the back wall over the sink, and a larger one to his left, next to the refrigerator. Murphy unlatched the window beside the refrigerator and threw it open. There was no screen. Cold rain hit the sill and splashed on his hands. He stuck his head out and looked left, toward the street. There were always a couple of cops assigned to cover the back during a search warrant, but he didn’t see anyone coming.

Up front, the glass door shattered. A second later, Murphy heard something metallic bouncing on the bedroom floor. It sounded like a soda can. He knew the sound. It was a flashbang. He opened his mouth so the concussion wouldn’t blow out his eardrums.

Boom! The flashbang exploded.

Murphy dove headfirst through the window. He landed hard on his right shoulder. The fall knocked the wind out of him. Pain shot from his collarbone to his fingertips. Then he heard a second flashbang skipping down the hall.

Boom! Another explosion. This one closer.

Murphy scrambled to his feet. He felt like he had been stabbed in the collarbone.

Behind the apartment was a wooden privacy fence. In the narrow space between the apartment and the fence lay a jumbled pile of rotten lumber, cracked cinder blocks, and old plumbing fixtures. If the detectives assigned to rear cover were on the other side of the house, the pile of junk would block them from reaching him.

The sound of stomping feet echoed through the apartment. A tight, nervous voice shouted, “Police. We have a search warrant.”

Murphy pulled the window closed and stepped to the side. When he turned around he was looking at a four-foot brick wall. He grabbed the top and half jumped, half pulled himself over and tumbled down the other side into the next-door neighbor’s back yard. As he fell he tried to get his feet under him, but he didn’t have time. He landed flat on his back and got the wind knocked out of him again.

He lay still, hoping no one had seen him, hoping there wasn’t a pet rottweiler or a pit bull in the yard with him. Next door there was lots of shouting. Then he heard, “Clear… clear… we’re code four.”

The dynamic search for the suspect was over. The meticulous search for evidence was about to begin.

If Murphy’s colleagues had found the kitchen window open, they would have suspected someone had slipped out the back. They would have called for uniform patrol units to set up a perimeter around the neighborhood and for K-9 assistance. Murphy had taken the time to close the window in hopes of avoiding that. His only chance to escape was if everyone on the raid team thought the house had been empty. Judging by the subdued sounds now coming from the apartment next door, it had worked.

After counting off sixty more seconds, Murphy pulled himself to his feet. The house in whose backyard he had fallen was dark. The owners had probably evacuated. Keeping below the top of the brick wall, Murphy flipped the hood of his raincoat over his head and crept across the yard. He checked his pocket and felt the crumpled utility bill. On the far side of the yard he turned toward the street and slinked past the dark house.

At the sidewalk he turned right and walked to the next corner. He circled the block until he reached Canal Street. To get to his car he was going to have to cross the end of South Saint Patrick Street, just a couple of houses down from the herd of cops who would be milling around the front of Jeffries’s apartment.

Traffic on Canal Street was almost nonexistent and there were no other pedestrians. Murphy felt like he had a flashing red sign strapped to his head that said LOOK AT ME. He stared straight ahead as he walked across South Saint Patrick. From the corner of his eye he saw several detectives standing in the rain, hunched under their jackets and hoods, smoking cigarettes.

Limping slightly from the pain of his two falls, Murphy shuffled past Saint Anthony’s church, then turned right and threaded his way along the far side of the building to the back parking lot.

Cautiously, he approached his car from the side opposite the apartment. He unlocked the driver’s door and slid behind the wheel. Through the rain-fogged windows he peeked out and saw that no one had noticed him. He slipped the key into the ignition and cranked the Taurus. Then he turned on his headlights and drove away.