A Killer Like Me

CHAPTER SEVEN

Friday, July 27, 8:05 AM

Murphy barged into Captain Donovan’s office. “We have a witness and a partial description of the serial killer,” he said.

The captain lumbered to his feet. For once he didn’t yell. He seemed tired. “If I hear the term serial killer come out of your mouth one more time, Murphy, I’m transferring you out of Homicide. Do you understand me?”

Gaudet dragged Murphy out before he had a chance to say anything really stupid.

Murphy was ragged. He and Gaudet had cut Deshotels loose at 2:00 AM after wringing everything they could from him.

“We’re keeping the shotgun,” Murphy had told the kid as he dropped him off on Octavia Street. “If you start crawfishing on us when we catch this guy, acting like you don’t recognize him, I’ll not only violate you on your probation, I’ll talk to a buddy at ATF and get a federal indictment against you for the shotgun.”

Like all evidence, the shotgun was supposed to be booked into Central Evidence and Property immediately after its seizure, but since the storm, CE amp;P had become even more of a circus than it had been before Katrina. Gaudet flipped a quarter. Murphy called tails. It landed heads.

Murphy waited in line for an hour to get to the lone, slow-moving property clerk. At 4:00 AM he called it quits. He put the sawed-off and the two shells inside a brown paper bag and tossed the bag into the trunk of his car. Then he went home to his apartment and grabbed two hours on the sofa. He didn’t even bother getting undressed.

After the meeting with Donovan, Murphy knocked on a door uptown, in the 1200 block of Fern Street, the door to the house where he had once lived. It was 9:30 AM.

The house was a shotgun single. Three concrete steps led to a small porch. A wooden swing hung next to the door, perpendicular to the front of the house. Murphy had hung the swing one crystal blue Saturday afternoon three years ago. Potted plants took up most of the rest of the space on the porch.

Kirsten Sparks pulled open the door. She took one look at Murphy and shook her head. “What the hell do you want, Murphy?” Kirsten had always called him by his last name. Even when she loved him.

She wore a white linen skirt and matching blouse. Her long red hair was pulled back into a ponytail. Her tattered leather attache case was slung over one shoulder and a purse hung from the other. She carried a fat set of keys in her hand.

Murphy felt self-conscious. He hadn’t showered or shaved. He was wearing an old tie and a rumpled shirt.

“Did they give you a medal?” she said.

“What?”

“For jumping on that wrinkle bomb. I hope you saved somebody else from looking like shit today.”

It was an old joke. One she had picked up from the boys in the newsroom. He smiled, but he didn’t feel it. “You headed to the paper?” he asked.

“That’s where I work.”

“I see you got off cops and started covering city government.”

It was a lame pun and she ignored it. “What are you doing here?”

Murphy felt like he was drowning. “I see your byline all the time. That was a great piece you did on the mayor and his bimbo assistant.”

Kirsten looked at her watch. “I’m filling in as assistant editor on the city desk, and I have a budget meeting in less than half an hour.”

Murphy stared at her. She had creamy white skin with a faint splash of freckles on her cheeks, and bright blue Irish eyes. She was beautiful.

The last time he saw her had been almost a year ago, a few weeks after they split up. She was at the Star amp; Crescent having a drink with a Second District detective named Tony Izzalino. Seeing her this morning, rushing out the door for work, a jumble of bags and keys, had made him realize how much he missed her.

“My mother has been asking about you,” Murphy said.

“Your mother hates me.”

“No she doesn’t.”

Kirsten shook her head. “Don’t bullshit a bullshitter, Murphy. She hated me, which was why going to visit her was about as much fun as chewing on tinfoil and shaving my head with a cheese grater.”

“Well… she hates everybody, including me.”

“I know you didn’t come here to talk about your mother, and I’m running late. What do you want?”

“I’ve got a story for you,” he said.

She shook her head again. “I’m not on the cops beat anymore, as you so humorously put it.”

“It’s a big story.”

Kirsten stepped out onto the porch and forced Murphy to back up. “I really have to go.” She turned around and locked the dead bolt, then walked past him.

“It’s about a serial killer,” he said.

She was on the bottom step when she turned around. “What serial killer?”

Murphy had known, at least hoped, that those two words would hook her. Kirsten was too good of a reporter for them not to. Now he had to follow through with the promise those words held. “We have a serial killer murdering women in New Orleans,” he said, the words tumbling out in a heap. “So far he’s killed eight that I know of.”

“Bullshit.”

“It’s true,” he said.

She stared at him for a second, mouth partly open, the tip of her tongue running along the top row of her teeth. Her teeth were whiter than he remembered them. Almost sparkling. “Why haven’t I heard about him?” she said.

“The rank is keeping a lid on it.”

“So why are you telling me?”

Murphy took a deep breath. “He’s killing prostitutes. They can’t protect themselves unless they know they’re in danger.”

Kirsten shook her head. “If someone has killed eight prostitutes, don’t you think the rest of them already know about it? I know you, Murphy. What’s your real reason?”

He hesitated. He considered. He formulated an answer suitable for a public servant. Then he rejected it. Instead, he looked in her eyes. “I can catch him.”

Once he said it out loud, once he stripped away all the pretense and the pseudo-sentimentality about protecting the public, Murphy realized that all of his badgering of the rank, all of his complaining about their inaction-everything-boiled down to that one simple statement. I can catch him.

Murphy was a homicide cop. The man he was after was a killer. It was the same reason dogs chased cats. It was the natural order of things.

“Are you heading a task force?” she asked.

Murphy shook his head.

“Why not?”

“The rank is in denial. They say the murders aren’t connected.”

“What makes you think they are?”

“The cause of death has been strangulation. The victims all shared common characteristics. Geographically, there are also certain similarities.”

“Prostitution is a dangerous occupation.”

“It’s the same guy, Kirsten. I know it. And when you hear the facts, you’ll know it. I said I can catch him, but I can’t do it alone. If the story breaks in the paper, the rank will have to respond. They’ll have to give me a task force.”

“Like I said, why me?”

“If you were me, who would you tell?”

She pulled a notebook from her purse and stepped back onto the porch. She took a seat on the swing. “Tell me what you know.”

Murphy told her the story, leaving out only the part about the cable ties. All he said about the cause of death was that the victims had been strangled. Holding back exactly how they had been strangled would help weed out the nutty confessors and copycats. It was something only the cops and the killer knew.

“Why won’t the department acknowledge that a serial killer is murdering prostitutes?” Kirsten said. “What are they afraid of?”

Murphy was sitting next to Kirsten on the swing, though he noticed she was careful to keep some distance between them.

“Serial killers attract attention,” he said. “Feds, the national media, self-proclaimed experts, kooks, bounty hunters, psychics-they all descend on the city. The rank doesn’t want that. Because of all the heat we took after Katrina, there was talk about disbanding the police department and letting the state police and the National Guard take over permanently. Most of that talk has died down, but there are still some state legislators who think that might be the best thing for the city. And that terrifies the rank.”

Kirsten stood and walked across the porch. She leaned against the far railing, her notebook and pen still in her hand. “This city is full of killers. Do they think one more is really going to matter, especially one killing prostitutes? Every second or third year we’re the murder capital of the country. Tourists can’t even walk in the French Quarter anymore without getting robbed.”

“Are you going to write the story?”

Kirsten glanced at her watch. “Of course I’m going to write it. It’s a big story. Scratch that. It’s a huge story.”

“You’ve got to keep my name out of it.”

“Somebody has to go on the record, Murphy. I can’t run a story this controversial with just an anonymous source.”

“The last time I went on the record with you I got fired.”

“How am I going to attribute it?”

“You’re the reporter.”

“The managing editor is going to want to know who my source is before he’ll even consider letting me publish quotes without a name attached to them.”

“I don’t care who wants to know. You can’t tell anyone where you got this information. PIB will come after me again, and this time they’ll make it permanent.”

“They didn’t fire you for talking to the press,” Kirsten said. “They fired you for blowing the lid on something they were trying to keep hidden. What you did took a lot of guts.”

“The rank considered it a betrayal.”

“Why, because you arrested a drug dealer and refused to throw the case?”

“Because I embarrassed the mayor.”

“His brother had a kilo of cocaine in his car. He should have gone to prison, not rehab.”

For all of Kirsten’s big-city-reporter cynicism, she really was naive, Murphy thought. Given enough spins of the wheel, she believed the world was supposed to come out fair, and that right would triumph over wrong, good over evil. It was sweet. Too bad it was wrong.

“PIB doesn’t like getting beat,” Murphy said. “And if you beat them, they come back at you with a vengeance. I’ve seen it happen before.”

“That was three years ago. I think you’re paranoid. If they were going to do something to you, they would have done it by now.”

“Are you going to keep my name out of the story?”

Kirsten looked at Murphy for a long few seconds. Then she nodded.

“Thanks,” he said.

She looked at her watch. “I missed the budget meeting. The city editor’s going to have a fit.”

Murphy stood. “Not when he finds out what’ve you got.”

She flipped through the pages of her notebook. “You really think he’s going to move away from prostitutes and start killing…”

“Normal women?” Murphy said.

“I know that sounds terrible but-”

“We call them true victims, people who don’t do things that are likely to get them killed, regular tax-paying citizens. And yeah, I think that’s what he’s going to do.”

“Didn’t you go to some FBI school on serial killers?”

“It was only a weeklong course.”

“Did they teach you anything there, or did you spend your time trying to get into the pants of some FBI chick?”

When Murphy didn’t respond, Kirsten turned and walked down the steps.

He followed her. His Taurus was parked at the curb behind her Volvo. He stopped beside her car as she slid behind the wheel. “Just keep my name out of it,” he said.

Kirsten turned and looked at him. “I will.”