Chuck Hustmyre - A Killer Like Me

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.