A Killer Like Me (4 page)

Wednesday, July 25, 8:00
AM

“This motherfucker must be crazy!” Detective Juan Gaudet said. “He kills this poor girl and dumps her body half a motherfucking mile from police headquarters.”

They were looking down at the naked corpse of another woman, this one under the South Jeff Davis overpass.

“Headquarters is just another empty building now,” Murphy said.

Gaudet took a deep breath. “Still . . .”

Murphy glanced at his partner. “Who are you talking about, anyway?”

“Don’t play with me, goddamnit. You know exactly who the fuck I’m talking about.

So you’re back with me on this?

I never left you on it. It just ain’t worth getting transferred to the Seventh District night watch over.

You agree this is the same guy?”

Gaudet squatted close to the dead woman’s midsection. His face tightened. “Look what he did to her, man.”

She lay on her back spread-eagled, with a rusty piece of steel rebar protruding a foot from her vagina. Her hands were missing.

“There’s not much blood,” Murphy said. “There’s a good chance she was dead when he did this.”

Gaudet stood. “This motherfucker is sick, you hear me, sick.

He’s a serial killer who mutilates women. He’s a fucking psycho.”

An hour ago a patrolman leaving lockup had spotted the body. The crime scene was a small patch of urban wasteland, in the middle of the city but out of sight from just about everywhere.

“Why take her hands?” Gaudet said.

Murphy shrugged. “Maybe he thinks that without fingerprints we won’t be able to identify her. Or maybe he took them for souvenirs.”

“What about the cable tie?” Gaudet said.

“What about it?”

“Why did he leave it this time but not last time?”

The woman’s eyes were bulged and bloodshot. Her tongue was black and swollen and hanging from her mouth.

“Maybe she died before he could remove it,” Murphy said. “Maybe he forgot his pocket knife.”

Gaudet stomped his feet in frustration. “Two victims in two days. I’m telling you, this motherfucker is crazy.” He bent over and tapped his pen against the hard plastic cable tie. “Where do you get these things?”

“Wal-Mart, Home Depot. They come in all sizes. He probably picked up a pack at a hardware store.”

“And once he puts it on there’s no way to get it off.”

Murphy shook his head. “You have to cut it.”

“They probably realize that,” Gaudet said. “His victims, I mean. They probably know there’s no way to get that thing off, that they’re going to die.”

“Probably.”

“How long you figure it takes?”

Murphy stared at the dead woman’s face. “About a minute before she blacks out. Three or four until she’s dead.”

The woman was young, early twenties, Murphy guessed. Other than some dental issues, probably from smoking crack, she wasn’t bad looking. Just the one tattoo, “Johnny’s Girl,” in script across the front of her thigh. If she could have gotten off the pipe, she might have had a chance at a decent life.

Murphy stepped away and started walking the crime scene.

A few minutes later, he found a black skirt and a pair of “fuck me” pumps lying against one of the concrete pylons, ten yards from the body.

A three-foot length of rusted steel rod lay just a few feet from the skirt and sandals. If the piece of rebar the killer had used on the victim was the same length as the one near the pylon, it meant he had shoved two feet of steel inside the woman. If she had been alive when he did it, she would have bled a lot more. Thank God for small favors.

Behind him, Gaudet said, “What are you going to do?”

“Give the rank one more chance to come clean about what’s going on.

And if they don’t?

If these girls knew there was a killer out here hunting them like animals, they’d be more careful. They wouldn’t get into cars with customers they don’t know. They could work in pairs, watch each other’s backs.”

“Or they could quit hooking,” Gaudet said.

“How likely is that?”

“And if the rank still won’t own up to the truth?”

“I’m going to do what I said.”

“Will she talk to you?”

Murphy nodded toward the body. “If it’s about a serial killer, yeah.

Hell hath no fury, my brother.”

How did the killer get her there?

It was a question Sean Murphy had been wrestling with since he first got to the South Jeff Davis crime scene.

He had shown a photo of the victim’s face to a couple of vice detectives. They knew her by sight but couldn’t remember her name. One of the vice cops remembered seeing her a couple of times working on Tulane near the courthouse.

There’s no way, Murphy thought, she would have walked the eight blocks from criminal district court to the Jeff Davis overpass with a john, not when the storm had left plenty of abandoned houses and empty buildings in between where she could knock out a two-minute blow job or a quick bend-over.

The logical answer was a car. Whether she’d gone voluntarily or involuntarily, the killer had driven her to the overpass.

Inside the Homicide office, sitting behind his shared desk—there were ten desks for sixteen detectives—Murphy typed out an intradepartmental memo, a Form 105, requesting that every platoon and shift commander in the city ask at roll call if any officer had seen anything suspicious or had taken note of any cars parked near Central Lockup, the still-abandoned police headquarters building, or the courthouse last night.

Since all interdepartmental memos had to go through the chain of command, Murphy figured his 105 would take a week to get into the hands of the people who would actually read it aloud at roll calls. Just enough time for anyone who saw anything suspicious to forget the details.

After dropping his memo in the captain’s in-box, Murphy drove to the ruined police headquarters building on Broad Street next to the courthouse. It was 1:00
PM
. Gaudet had gone to court at ten o’clock that morning and said he expected to be there all day, waiting to testify in an old homicide case. Murphy decided to canvass the fourteen-square-block area between the courthouse and the crime scene, looking for surveillance cameras.

A thorough canvass had to be done on foot. It was too easy to miss something in a car. The area was bordered by Tulane Avenue, Broad Street, Perdido Street, and South Jeff Davis Parkway. It was a run-down, half-abandoned, trapezoid-shaped section of Mid-City, bisected down its long axis by Gravier Street. Small shotgun houses lined the interior thruways.

Katrina had dumped four feet of water onto the neighborhood and run everyone off. A lot of people hadn’t come back. In addition to police headquarters, the district attorney’s office, across the street from criminal district court, still stood empty. The DA had taken his people to a building on Poydras Street, not far from the Superdome. There were cameras outside the old DA’s building, but they hadn’t worked since the storm.

Three small businesses—a corner store, a hair salon, and a tire shop—provided the only commerce in the neighborhood, and by the look of things, all three were on life support. Only the tire shop had a security camera. Speedy’s Tires stood on the corner of South Rendon and Gravier, in the block adjacent to where the woman’s body had been found.

“I only got two tapes,” the owner told Murphy. “I rotate them so they last longer.”

The two men stood just inside the work bay.

“Which tape did you have in last night?” Murphy asked.

“It’s still in the machine,” the man said. He was tall, six three, about fifty years old, with big, powerful shoulders. He looked prison hard.

Murphy glanced at the heat waves rising off the street. A breeze would be nice, he thought. “Can I take a look at it?” Murphy said. His feet hurt. He was sweating bullets. It was too damn hot to be pounding the pavement in a suit and tie.

“Sure,” the big man said. Then he turned around and walked toward his office at the back of the shop.

Murphy fell in behind him.

The office was small and cluttered. A pile of tire catalogs, stacks of receipt books, a gray metal desk, a file cabinet, a bookcase—all jammed into an eight-foot-by-eight-foot square. An old videotape recorder and a thirteen-inch black-and-white television sat on a shelf over the desk.

“I got broke into a little over a year ago,” the tire man said. “Little bastards just kicked open the front door and came right on in.”

“What’d they get?” Murphy asked.

“Tires and rims, and my cash box. I don’t keep cash around here no more, and I put a security camera on the corner of the building to watch the front door.” The shop owner punched a button on the video recorder and grabbed the VHS tape when it popped out.

“How long does a tape last?”

“About twelve hours. The camera only takes a picture every few seconds. They call it time . . . time something. Time delay, I think.”

“Time-lapse,” Murphy said.

A label stuck on the edge of the tape had the words
Speedy’s Tire—Tape One
handwritten across it.

“Are you Speedy?” Murphy asked.

The man nodded. “My daddy gave me that name.”

Speedy held the tape out to Murphy. “You can take it with you. Just bring it back when you’re finished.”

Murphy nodded. “I don’t even think we have a VCR at the office that works. You mind if I watch a little of it here?”

“Be my guest,” Speedy said. He shoved the tape back into the machine and mashed a flattened thumb against the power button on the TV. Then he hit the rewind button on the VCR.

“I’m sorry about the time,” Speedy said as soon as the tape started playing.

At the bottom of the TV screen the date and time flashed “01-01-01/12:00
AM
.”

“The power keeps going out and I can’t ever remember how to reset it.”

“It’s not a problem,” Murphy said. “What time did you start recording last night?”

“About six o’clock.”

According to the coroner’s best guess, the woman had probably been killed between 9:00
PM
and 1:00
AM
. That meant Murphy didn’t need to watch the first three hours or the last five. Just that four-hour stretch in the middle. He had a VCR at home that would show the elapsed time, as long as he started the tape at the beginning and reset the counter.

But what if the killer had cruised the neighborhood earlier in the evening to get a feel for it? Or drove around afterward to stay close to the victim? Murphy realized he was going to have to watch the whole tape. He punched the eject button. “I better take it home. This is going to take a while.”

“I’m sorry about that, Detective. You go on and keep that tape as long as you want. I’ll use the other one until you get done.”

Even on fast-forward, watching the entire tape was going to take at least three hours.

Great, Murphy thought. Just great.

At the recently refurbished criminal district court building, the images from the surveillance cameras fed into a digital recorder. Unlike Speedy’s, the time stamp on the sheriff’s video recorder was set properly.

At 4:00
PM
, Murphy sat down at a desk in the third-floor security office and started watching video.

There were four cameras on the outside of the building, but only two of them had views of the street. One camera was aimed at the prisoner gate at the back of the building and another monitored the main door facing Tulane Avenue. One camera shot images of Tulane and Broad, where there were too many cars to count. The last camera had a view of South White Street, which ran along the west side of the courthouse.

Murphy watched the recording from the camera facing South White Street at four times bodytext speed, but even then it took until after 7:00
PM
to get through it. By the time he finished, the courthouse was closed and a deputy had to let him out through the staff door.

Twenty-eight cars had driven down South White Street between 3:00
PM
yesterday and three o’clock this morning. Before Katrina there would have been three or four times that number. The camera was close enough so Murphy could read the license-plate numbers on twenty-six of the cars. One didn’t have a tag, and one went by so fast he couldn’t read the numbers.

On the way home Murphy stopped at the Star & Crescent and had two beers. Then he went home to watch the videotape from Speedy’s tire shop.

Thursday, July 26, 9:30
AM

“How was court?” Murphy said as he stepped into the squad room.

Gaudet swiveled his head away from his computer keyboard. “A waste of time.”

Murphy dropped into the chair behind the desk he shared with a detective on another shift. “They didn’t call you to the stand?”

“I sat there all day and they didn’t even finish picking the jury.”

“Couldn’t the assistant DA put you on standby?”

Gaudet shrugged. “He’s some new tight-ass prick, said he needed me there to help with jury selection.”

Murphy looked at the clock on the wall. “What time do you have to be back?”

“He said he wanted me there by nine.”

“So why are you still here?”

“I told him I had to be at the firing range until noon.”

“We’re not going to the range today,” Murphy said. “I can’t even remember the last time we shot.”

“The DA don’t know that.”

“Good point.” Murphy spun around and started thumbing through the stack of pink message slips on the desk.

“How did it go with the surveillance cameras?” Gaudet asked.

Murphy didn’t see any messages he felt like returning. He threw the entire pile in the wastebasket next to his desk. He looked at Gaudet. “I got a bunch of license-plate numbers from one of the courthouse cameras. The other cameras were pretty much a bust. I also got a few tags off of a security camera at a tire shop.”

“Speedy’s?”

“Yeah,” Murphy said. “You know him?”

Gaudet nodded. “I bought some retreads from him once for my nephew’s car. He did some time back in the day, but he’s straight now.”