Chuck Hustmyre - A Killer Like Me

Jensen opened his eyes. “His hair must have been parted on the right because I seen a scar over his right eye.”

Murphy felt a tingling of excitement. “Tell me about the scar.”

Jensen touched his forehead above his right eyebrow. “Right here. A diagonal line, couple inches long, three at most.”

“What did he do after he ran into your cart?” Murphy said.

“He kind of bounced off. He knocked me over but not my sled.” Jensen nodded toward his Lucky Dog cart. “Thing weighs three hundred pounds.”

“Did he say anything?”

“He called me a name.”

“What name?” Murphy asked.

“An old-fashioned name for a… homosexual.”

“What did he say?”

The hot-dog vendor scratched his head. After several seconds he snapped his fingers. “A sodomite. He called me a sodomite. Like that town in the Bible where everybody was queer.”

Murphy nodded. In the killer’s letter to the newspaper he had used the biblical word harlot to describe his last two victims. The letter also contained other religious references. He sounded like someone who would use an archaic word like sodomite to describe a person he thought was gay.

Murphy pulled out his notebook.

Jensen’s forehead wrinkled with worry, but he wasn’t looking at Murphy’s notebook. He was looking down the street at where the Red Door Lounge had been. “You figure he thought I was gay?”

“I don’t think he meant it personally,” Murphy said.

Jensen looked relieved. “I did some time, but, you know, that was prison. I ain’t queer.”

“Give me a phone number where I can reach you?”

The Lucky Dog man gave Murphy his cell number.

“We have a computer program that develops a composite picture based on witness descriptions,” Murphy said. “I want you to work with us on putting together a picture of the man you saw.”

Jensen shook his head. “I don’t want to go to court, not on something like this.”

“You won’t have to go to court,” Murphy said, knowing it was almost certainly a lie. But witnesses had to be coaxed.

“You sure?” The hot-dog vendor looked skeptical.

Murphy nodded. He knew he had to sound convincing. Jensen was an ex-con and knew the system. “When we catch this guy he’s going to have to plead to avoid the death penalty. There won’t be a trial. No trial, no witnesses.”

“All right, then.” Jensen looked relieved. “Long as I ain’t got to go to court.”

“I’ll call you tomorrow,” Murphy said. “And thanks for your help.”

Jensen nodded and shuffled off. A minute later he was pushing his Lucky Dog cart down Iberville toward the burned-out building, toward a bunch of hungry firemen and cops.

Friday, August 3, 9:20 AM

“TV has crushed us on this,” said Times-Picayune managing editor Milton Stanford. “It led this morning, it’ll lead at noon, and it’ll lead tonight at six and ten. Meanwhile, we’ve got nothing.”

“It’s on the Web,” Internet editor Harvey Banks said.

Stanford glared at Banks. “That’s great, Harvey, but it’s not in the paper yet, and last time I checked we were still a news- paper.”

Kirsten Sparks was one of a dozen editors and reporters crammed into the big conference room. Stanford stood at the head of the table. He had been on a tear for the last twenty minutes, railing against the speed and shallowness of TV news coverage, and also condemning the nickname some of his veteran reporters had given to the Red Door fire, the Big Weenie Roast.

The 8:00 AM emergency budget meeting was well into its second hour.

“I want a package for tomorrow with every imaginable detail about the Red Door fire and a historical sidebar on the 1973 fire,” Stanford said, his gaze sweeping the room. “I want reaction from the local gay community, a quote from some national gay-rights leader, the latest from the police and fire departments, victim profiles, and I want comparisons of this fire with other big fires around the country, like the Triangle Factory Fire.”

Stanford directed his gaze. “Kirsten, I want you to pump your police sources…”

Laughter broke out from the nearly all-male crowd.

Kirsten felt her face flush. She knew it was involuntary, an autonomic response, the result of her damn female hormones. She couldn’t care less about the guys’ sexual innuendos and wisecracks. Newsrooms were newsrooms, and no amount of time-wasting, expensive sensitivity training was going to change that. If you wanted to swim with sharks, you had to learn to bite.

Stanford’s face was red. “Kirsten, I didn’t say that intentionally as some sort of… I…” Stanford was a boss. In this era of political correctness, he had to be careful not to say anything that might offend anyone. One slip could cost him his career.

Kirsten threw him a lifeline. “Milton, please. No apologies are necessary. Truth is, I’ve seen a few of the dicks in this room and they’re worth a good laugh.” That wasn’t true. She hadn’t slept with any of the reporters or editors in the room, but they didn’t know that.

There was some uncomfortable chuckling but it died quickly.

Back to business. Kirsten arched her eyebrows. “What were you saying, Milton?”

“I want to know if the fire investigation, which the coroner says involves at least seventy homicides, is going to draw resources away from the serial-killer investigation.”

City editor Gene Michaels spoke up. “Could they be connected?”

“What do you mean?” Stanford said.

Kirsten knew that Gene had once been an investigative reporter for United Press International. He had a good nose for news.

Michaels laid his hands on the table and leaned back in his chair. “If we accept that the letter we received is legitimate, and given what accompanied it, I don’t think there’s any doubt, then the killer’s musings have a pseudoevangelical theme. For instance, he used the word harlot, he said he was doing the Lord’s work, and he called himself the Lamb of God.”

“What’s your point?” Stanford said.

“My point,” Michaels continued in his distinctive Southern drawl, “is that a lot of evangelicals have a problem with homosexuality, and I’m just wondering if this guy set that fire in order to fulfill the threat he made to kill a whole bunch of people if we didn’t publish his letter.”

“Wait just a damn minute,” Stanford said. “Are you suggesting that our decision not to publish this guy’s letter was enough to cause him to set a fire that killed seventy people?”

“He’s not a rational person,” Michaels said. “He’s a psychotic. And I’m not saying he did it. I’m just saying the possibility is worth-”

Stanford snapped his focus to Kirsten. “You’re our serial-killer expert. What do you think?”

She shrugged. “Like Gene was saying, it’s worth looking into. What are the odds that we have a prolific serial killer and the biggest mass murderer in the city’s history running around at the same time and they’re not connected?”

Stanford dropped into his chair and rubbed his chin. “That’s something I doubt TV will have.” He looked at Kirsten. “Get on it.”

At 5:30 PM, Murphy and Gaudet, along with the two detectives assigned to the new serial-killer task force-Joey Dagalotto and Danny Calumet-were seated at a table in the back of Felix’s Oyster House on Iberville at Bourbon, two blocks from the fire.

Close enough to smell the ashes.

The fried-oyster po’ boy Murphy had just eaten sat in his gut like a wet sleeping bag.

Murphy and Gaudet had spent fourteen hours at the fire scene. They had helped carry out seventy-three bodies wrapped in black rubber bags. Dr. Maynard had found two more victims in a bathroom.