Chuck Hustmyre - A Killer Like Me

“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.”

“I got that impression.”

“So what’s next?”

“Well, while you were wasting time in court-”

“Hey, brother, I’m sorry about that. You know I would have been there if I could. I love walking around in the hot sun for hours on end, sweating my balls off.”

“You probably didn’t even have court. I didn’t get a subpoena.”

“It’s an old case,” Gaudet said. “From back when you were off the job, drinking heavily and trysting with barmaids.”

“Did you say trysting?”

“Damn right, I did. What of it?”

“Do you even know what a tryst is?”

“I used the word correctly, didn’t I,” Gaudet said, his voice loaded with feigned indignation. “Just because I’m black and went to Delgado instead of Notre Dame, don’t mean I’m not ed-u-cated.”

“I only went to Notre Dame for a year.”

“Then you went to Loyola.”

“Yeah, for another year.”

“Still, you’re a white boy and you went to two fancy schools. It’s not my fault you weren’t smart enough to graduate from either one.”

Murphy thought about the winter he spent in South Bend, the coldest he had ever known. Despite the freezing temperature, it had been a good year. His first time away from home. Then a king-size guilt trip from his mother-a Catholic boy’s rite of passage-brought him back. The scholarship wasted. Then a year uptown at Jesuit-run Loyola, until the money ran out.

After that, he spent three years working on a tugboat. He was making good money and figured one day he might earn a skipper’s cap. Then he saw a billboard advertisement for the New Orleans Police Department. He could still remember the exact words: BE A PROFESSIONAL AND PROTECT YOUR COMMUNITY. JOIN THE FIGHT. JOIN THE NOPD.

In the mid-1990s, New Orleans was the most violent city in America. A police recruiter told Murphy he could help bring New Orleans back to its former glory as one of America’s great cities. Murphy had bought that bullshit hook, line, and sinker. He signed up despite the huge pay cut. His uncle had been on the job then and tried to talk him out of joining the department. Murphy was hardheaded.

His partner’s mock condescension snapped Murphy back to the present. “While you were wasting time in college trying to be a jock,” Gaudet said, “I was studying recidivism and probated-spiral-compression theory on my way to earning an associate’s degree in criminal justice from a fine institution of higher learning.”

“Delgado Community College.”

“That’s right,” Gaudet said. “But I like to think of it as Delgado University.”

“It took you four years to get a two-year degree.”

“I read slow.”

“At least you learned the word tryst,” Murphy said. “That’s something.”

“Speaking of tryst, what did you decide to do about that thing you were talking about yesterday?”

“That wasn’t a tryst,” Murphy said. “When you move in together, the tryst is over.”

Gaudet laughed. “That ain’t all that’s over.”

Murphy nodded.

“Besides,” Gaudet said, “I just like saying that word, feeling the way it rolls off my tongue.” He stuck his tongue out and flicked it up and down.

Murphy ignored the urge to throw up. “I’m going to do exactly what I said. I’m going to give the rank one more shot. Then I’m going to do whatever it takes to get some resources for this case.”

“I hope you know what you’re doing.”

Murphy shrugged. “Me too.”

By midafternoon, Murphy was only halfway through his list of license-plate numbers.

The process was tedious. He had to run each number through the police department’s ponderous, 1980s-era computer system known as MOTION, which stood for Metropolitan Orleans Total Information Online Network. Some MOTION terminals were so antiquated they looked like 1960s vacuum-tube television sets. The program required users to log in with a social-security number and password for each query. For Murphy that meant more than thirty individual log-ins.

The different programs within the system weren’t integrated. When the registered owner of a vehicle popped up, using a program called SLIX, Murphy had to jot down the owner’s name and date of birth, then exit the vehicle subsystem and log in to the criminal-history subsystem, called MONA, to find out if the vehicle owner had ever been arrested or had an active warrant.

And so it went, back and forth between SLIX and MONA, running tags, then checking for criminal histories.

By five o’clock he was done. Of the twenty-six tags from the courthouse camera, twelve of the registered owners had rap sheets. Of the six license-plate numbers he had pulled off the surveillance tape from Speedy’s tire shop, only one had a record, but Murphy put that record at the top of his list.

Sometime between 10:00 PM and 11:00 PM -it was impossible to pinpoint the time, because Murphy wasn’t sure exactly when Speedy had started recording-a Chevy Camaro had driven past the tire shop. Because the security camera was black-and-white, Murphy couldn’t tell the color, but SLIX listed the Camaro’s color as red.

The license plate came back registered to Jonathan Deshotels of New Orleans. Deshotels was a twenty-year-old scumbag with arrests for burglary, felony theft, and rape. In a rare moment of functionality, MONA actually showed the disposition of Deshotels’s rape charge. A year and a half ago, he pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of sexual battery. He got a suspended sentence and was placed on five years’ probation. A cush deal for a rapist.

As a convicted sex offender, young Deshotels had to keep local law enforcement apprised of his current address or risk having his probation revoked and being sent to prison, where he would likely be raped himself. He also had to stay away from schools, playgrounds, and other places where kids congregated.

Nothing in Deshotels’s record indicated he was a pedophile, but Louisiana’s sex-offender law, like those of most states, didn’t differentiate. All sex offenders got treated like child molesters.

At 9:00 PM, Murphy was parked down the street from Deshotels’s last known address, a small duplex uptown on Octavia Street. He had been watching the place for more than an hour. So far he had not seen the red Camaro.

The architectural design of the house Murphy was watching was known as a shotgun double. Local lore says the houses, which have a simple, rectangular floor plan, got their name because a person could fire a shotgun in the front door and out the back door without hitting anything in between.

Murphy wanted to know why Deshotels had been cruising the backstreets around the courthouse late Tuesday night.

Like most scumbags, Deshotels used several addresses. He had listed this one on Octavia Street as his home address when he was last arrested six months ago. The arrest had been for a probation violation, but the bust had not resulted in Deshotels’s probation being revoked. More than likely he had skipped a meeting, and his probation officer had had an arrest warrant issued just to throw a scare into him.

Murphy could only hope Deshotels hadn’t moved since then.