Chuck Hustmyre - A Killer Like Me

“You think we’ll catch him?” Calumet said.

Despite his promise of a six-man task force, Captain Donovan had only given Murphy two extra detectives, both young, both inexperienced, both on loan from the burglary unit. Neither had ever worked a homicide before.

Murphy turned up his frosted mug and drained the last of his beer. He wiped his lips with the back of his hand. “They always get caught-eventually.”

Gaudet snapped his fingers. They were greasy from the pile of onion rings and fried shrimp he’d devoured, and barely made a sound. “That’s not what you told Donovan.”

Murphy looked across the table at his partner. “What do you mean?”

“When he said New Orleans had never had a serial killer, you told him there was a guy called the Axman who was never caught.”

Murphy shook his head. “I said, officially he was never caught. Unofficially, he got what was coming to him.”

“How do you know that?” Gaudet said. “Wasn’t that case like a hundred years ago?”

“Almost,” Murphy said. “My great-grandfather worked on it in 1919.”

“I knew your uncle was on the job,” Gaudet said, “but you never said nothing about your great-grandfather.”

Murphy stared at his empty mug as he swirled it in a puddle of condensation on the table. “He didn’t exactly have a stellar career with the department.”

Gaudet smiled. “Kind of like you?”

“Worse,” Murphy said. “He killed some city official. Then he either quit or got fired and became a private detective. Supposedly, a couple of years later he found the Axman in California and killed him.”

“So the case was solved,” Gaudet said.

Murphy shrugged. “A few years ago, I got curious if all that family history stuff I’d heard all my life was true, so I went to the library and did some research. Turns out my great-grandfather was mentioned in several newspaper articles as the lead detective in the Axman case. I also found an article from a couple of years later about him killing a guy in Los Angeles. But according to NOPD records, all the Axman murders are officially still open.”

“So he didn’t kill the right guy,” Gaudet said.

“There weren’t any more Axman killings,” Murphy said.

“Wow,” Danny Calumet said. “That’s a hell of a story.”

Gaudet signaled for the check. Everybody reached for their wallets.

“I got it,” Gaudet said. He pulled out a wad of bills that smelled like soot and looked damp when he dropped them on the Formica table.

Joey Dagalotto, the other neophyte detective, whom everyone called Joey Doggs, glanced around before asking, “Is that from… down the street?”

Gaudet nodded. “I figured the guy wasn’t going to need it anymore.”

Doggs and Calumet looked at Murphy, their eyes asking, “Are you cool with this?”

Murphy nodded.

Friday, August 3, 7:15 PM

Kirsten Sparks hung up her phone and glanced at the clock on her desk. There was less than two hours until deadline. She got up and walked to Gene Michaels’s cubicle. The city editor was banging away on his keyboard, editing stories for tomorrow’s paper. He peered up at Kirsten over the top of his reading glasses.

“The serial killer started the Red Door fire,” she said.

Michaels just stared at her.

“Did you hear me, Gene? You were right. The Lamb of God Killer just added seventy souls to his body count. This is huge.”

Michaels glanced at his watch. “Who’s your source?”

“That’s the problem.”

“What?”

“I’ve got one source but no confirmation,” Kirsten said. “A guy at the coroner’s office said Murphy’s task force has taken over the Red Door investigation.”

“Did you call Murphy?”

“He won’t answer,” Kirsten said.

“Does he know we’re running a profile on him tomorrow?”

“No.”

“Why not? Didn’t you write that story as a mea culpa for getting him kicked out of Homicide?”

“Of course not,” Kirsten said, although that was exactly why she wrote it. The puff piece was her way of apologizing to Murphy for the hammering he took for coming forward with the serial-killer story. “We don’t apologize for reporting the news.”

“Too bad,” Michaels said. “I hear he’s a good detective. Be a shame if our story wrecked his career.”

Kirsten didn’t want to talk about Sean Murphy, especially not with her boss. “What about the Lamb of God and the fire?”

“If we’re going to break that story in the morning, we need a second source.” The city editor looked at his watch again. “Within the next hour.”

“I’ve got calls out to everybody I know, but all I’ve got so far is an official denial from the police department. My source was at the scene, though. He saw Murphy running the investigation. We’ve at least got enough to mention a possible link between the fire and the serial killer.”

“I’ve got to go to Milton on this,” Michaels said. “Meanwhile, keep working your sources. If you get confirmation we’ll put it on A-1 and shove it up TV’s ass.”

Taking the woman alive was easier than the killer thought. One touch with the stun gun. Some duct tape around her ankles, arms, and wrists. Then a pillowcase over her head.

He can hear her in the trunk, her cries muffled through the tape covering her mouth.

Driving down Saint Claude Avenue, the killer enters the neighborhood known as Bywater, part of the Ninth Ward, a section of New Orleans made infamous by constant TV news coverage after Katrina that showed eight feet of water in the streets and people stranded on rooftops. But that was the Lower Ninth Ward, on the other side of the Industrial Canal.

On this side of the canal, the flooding was less severe, and in the five blocks between Saint Claude and the river there had been no flooding at all.

Bywater is a maze of single-lane, one-way streets. The killer turns right on Bartholomew, then threads his way through the neighborhood, eventually stopping beside a two-story building on Burgundy Street at the corner of Mazant.

The clapboard-sided building is more than a hundred years old and was once a grocery store. The front door is built into a corner and faces the intersection of the two streets. A first-floor overhang, supported by wooden columns, covers both adjacent sidewalks.

The killer pulls his Honda to the curb on the Mazant side, just past the driveway that runs behind the building. He gets out of his car and approaches a pair of wrought-iron gates that enclose the end of the driveway. The gates are chained together and secured with a padlock. He opens the lock and pushes aside the gates. Then he backs his car into the driveway, stopping just a few feet from a door that leads into the rear of the building.

It’s almost midnight. The driveway is shrouded in darkness.

The killer pulls a nylon gym bag from the backseat and sets it next to the building’s rear door. Then he stands a few feet behind the car and unlocks the trunk. As he expected, the woman is a coiled spring. She lashes out with her feet, but because her ankles are taped together she has no leverage.

In his right hand the killer grips his stun gun, its nylon lanyard looped around his wrist. He steps forward and jams the electric contacts against the woman’s exposed thigh. He triggers the device and watches as she convulses hard, her muscles locked in an agonizing spasm that lasts several seconds.

The killer engages the safety on the stun gun and shoves it into his front pocket. He steps over to the gym bag and pulls out a plastic water bottle filled with a clear liquid. Holding the sixteen-ounce bottle at arm’s length, he twists off the cap. He can smell the powerful fumes.