What a wonderfully delicious plot twist it would have been had General Zaroff intended to hunt Sanger Rainsford down like an animal and eat him.
The killer looks at his antique typewriter, bought from a pawnshop for twenty-five dollars cash, and untraceable back to him. He tries to force his mind to focus on the task at hand. He needs his medication to keep him focused. Something dragged his mind here, to the word game , to the short fiction story, to the Zodiac. What was it?
The codes. That was it. Those unfathomable, indecipherable Zodiac ciphers. The Zodiac Killer included long passages of code in several of his hand-printed letters that he said contained clues to his identity. The ciphers were combinations of letters, many printed backward, and arcane symbols. Only the first one or two coded passages were ever deciphered. The rest remain unbroken to this day.
The killer knows nothing about codes. He wants to type a letter to the newspaper, not invent a cipher. But the police and the paper don’t have to know that. Thinking about the hours they will waste poring over every letter makes him laugh. He imagines the police bringing in the FBI, the CIA, the National Security Agency-all for nothing. His code will be meaningless, just babel. But it will stymie them.
He will also send them a little gift, something to establish his bona fides right away.
The killer’s hands hover again over the type keys. Carefully, he begins to peck at them.
DEAR EDITOR:
THIS IS…
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Saturday, July 28, 8:10 AM
“If I had the authority, I’d fire you right now!” Captain Donovan said. “Unfortunately, there is a procedure that must be followed first.”
Murphy stood rigid in front of Donovan’s desk. Beside the captain, standing arrow straight like a wooden Indian, was Assistant Chief Larry DeMarco, commander of the Detective Bureau. Neither one normally worked weekends.
DeMarco had not said a word during the ten minutes Donovan had been shouting at Murphy. He didn’t need to. He just stood there in his starched uniform, the three gold stars of his rank shining on each sharply pressed epaulet.
The captain backhanded a stack of papers off his desk. “According to civil-service rules, an immediate suspension has to be with pay until the chief jumps through all the administrative hoops to change it to a disciplinary suspension without pay,” Donovan said. “You’d end up, for a while at least, getting paid to do nothing. So I’m not going to order an immediate suspension in your case, Murphy. I’m going to transfer you-with full pay-and let the chief decide how to handle your termination.”
DeMarco cleared his throat. “What the captain means, Detective, is that the chief is not going to make a decision until he gets the results of a complete PIB investigation. You will be entitled to a hearing, of course, and an appeal.”
Donovan kept his eyes fixed on Murphy but addressed the assistant chief. “He’s familiar with the process.”
“After the appeal,” DeMarco continued, “you can take the matter to district court, but the law says a district judge’s decision on civil-service matters is final. You can’t appeal the decision.”
Murphy tried to stare down DeMarco but couldn’t. The assistant chief’s eyes were like black ice and they froze Murphy, eventually forcing him to look away.
Four years ago, DeMarco had been a deputy chief, the two-star commander of PIB and the driving force behind the internal investigation that led to Murphy being fired. Before taking command of PIB, DeMarco had spent ten years as the head of the Public Affairs Division, the department’s face on the nightly news. The public knew him and trusted him.
DeMarco was a politician, not a cop, and like all politicians he was ambitious. He had his sights set on the chief’s chair. The current chief, Ralph Warren, had taken over the top spot a month after Katrina, after his predecessor had a mental breakdown and walked off the job, leaving the department and city in chaos. Warren was the mayor’s lapdog and DeMarco was the chief’s protege and heir apparent.
Four years ago was also when, as a newly made sergeant in the Major Narcotics Unit, Murphy put the mayor’s younger brother in jail after he and Gaudet caught him driving around in a city-owned Lincoln Town Car with two nearly naked strippers in the front seat and a kilo of cocaine in the backseat.
Despite pressure from city hall, Murphy had refused to throw the case. The day after he testified at the preliminary hearing, PIB slammed him with a laundry list of “charges,” chickenshit departmental violations that included not notifying the dispatch desk that he and his partner were getting out on a vehicle stop when they pulled over the mayor’s brother, and failing to turn in trip sheets at the end of every shift.
Twenty-seven violations in all. Alone, none worth more than an ass chewing by his platoon commander or a letter of reprimand in his personnel jacket, but taken together, and pushed by the hidden hand of the mayor, they earned him a 180-day suspension, the maximum allowed under civil-service rules.
After the suspension, which had also cost Murphy his new sergeant stripes, the chief converted the suspension into a termination.
If the department had just fired him, Murphy could have hired a lawyer and begun his appeal. He also could have looked for a job. Department rules require an officer-even a suspended officer-to get official approval for any outside employment, something the department brass never gives a suspended cop. After six months of living on his savings, Murphy was broke.
Luckily, he was friends with an ex-NOPD sergeant who had gone to night school to become an attorney. The lawyer agreed to handle Murphy’s appeal and defer his fee until Murphy got back on his feet. At a Police Civil Service Board hearing six months later, Murphy’s lawyer kicked the crap out of the city attorney. The board reversed the termination order and reduced Murphy’s 180-day suspension to ninety days and ordered the city to give him three months’ back pay.
In a bureaucratic oversight, the board’s decision didn’t address the issue of Murphy’s demotion from sergeant back to patrolman, so the department got to keep his stripes. When the check for the back pay finally came, the ex-cop turned lawyer took half of it.
Murphy had his job back, though.
A year later, he got into a shootout with a pair of cranked-up bank robbers who had just murdered a security guard. Murphy killed one bandit and wounded the other. He managed to parlay the shootout into a transfer back to Homicide.
Then came Katrina and nothing had been right since.
“I just want to know one thing, Murphy,” Donovan said. “What the fuck were you thinking? What did you think was going to happen after the mayor and the chief read the paper this morning? Did you think they were going to give you a task force?”
Murphy didn’t answer. There was nothing so say.
“No, I really want to know,” Donovan continued. “I mean, it’s the clearest violation of section seventy-four point eight of the department’s manual of orders I’ve ever seen, and I’m just curious what you thought was going to happen.”
A miserable silence hung in the air. Donovan and DeMarco stared at Murphy.
“I don’t know, Captain,” Murphy said. “It was a mistake, I know that, but I thought the public had a right to know what was going on. I also figured some press coverage might generate tips from-”
“Who gave you the authority to make decisions for this department, Murphy?” the homicide commander shouted. “Who the fuck put you in charge?”
The assistant chief looked at his watch. “Captain,” he said, “we’ve got a press conference to go to. Let’s wrap this up.”
Donovan hoisted himself to his feet. “Officer Murphy, as of this moment you are assigned to Central Evidence and Property. Beginning tonight and until further notice, you will report to the property room each day, in uniform, for your regular shift, ten twenty-five p.m. to seven a.m. Before you leave here this morning, you will clean out your desk and turn in all of your case files, all your notes, your office keys, your radio, your vest, and your car.”