The phone rang again. Zevon’s werewolf howling for another old lady to munch on.
Murphy snatched up the phone and flipped it open. A restricted number. He jammed his thumb down on the green send button.
“Murphy,” he said.
“Did you see the story?” It was Kirsten.
Murphy had forgotten that the newspaper’s telephone numbers didn’t come up on caller ID either. He looked at his watch, a few minutes past eight. Considering she usually worked until nine or ten at night, Kirsten was at the paper awfully early. “I saw it,” he said.
A loud silence hung between them.
Kirsten finally broke it. “I wasn’t trying to wreck your career.”
“What were you trying to do?”
“I don’t know… get even, I guess.”
“Thanks.”
“I’m sorry, Murphy. I was so mad at-”
“I handed you the biggest story of your career because I trusted you.”
“And I trusted you!”
That set him back for a few seconds. “This is my job, my livelihood, you’ve put in jeopardy. What happened before, with us, was personal. Nobody’s career got demolished. It’s not like I have any other job skills. There’s no fallback plan here.”
“That’s why in today’s story I tried to point out how stupid it was for them to transfer you,” Kirsten said. “You’re the only cop with any training or experience in serial-killer investigations.”
Another long silence dragged by.
“Do you think it might help?” Kirsten asked.
“I don’t see how.”
“Soon the department will have to acknowledge you were right and that there is a serial killer.”
“You’re wrong,” Murphy said. “They don’t have to do anything. If it becomes obvious to everyone that the murders are connected, the rank will claim they knew it all along and were trying to keep it quiet because they didn’t want the killer to know they were on to him. Either way, it won’t affect what’s going to happen to me.”
“Why not?”
Murphy rapped his knuckles on the bar to get the bartender’s attention. She was a thin girl with hollow cheeks, sitting on a stool behind the bar and staring up at a TV mounted high on the back wall. The mute was on, but a meteorologist was standing in front of a weather screen pointing to a tropical storm far out in the Atlantic Ocean. When the bartender turned around, Murphy lifted his beer bottle and shook it, the international signal for “bring me another beer.”
Murphy turned his attention back to Kirsten. “The rank has me by the balls for unauthorized contact with the media.”
“They already stuck you in the property room. What else can they do?”
“Fire me.”
“If they fired every cop who spoke to a reporter-”
“It’s not every cop, Kirsten. It’s just me. This time they’re going for a knockout. Thanks to you.”
The bartender popped the top on a fresh Budweiser. She set it down on the bar in front of Murphy and went back to staring up at the TV. Crystals of ice slid down the side of the bottle.
“I have a meeting with the city editor at nine,” Kirsten said. “The bosses want a follow-up to the serial-killer story.”
“You called me for a quote?”
“No. I called because I wanted to… apologize for what happened. I didn’t mean for it to go this far.”
“So what you’re saying is you meant to stab me in the back, you just didn’t mean for the blade to sink so deep.”
“You’re the one who picked up the knife first-asshole.”
She hung up before Murphy could respond. He slammed his phone down on the bar and washed his anger down with a gulp of beer.
On TV, the news had switched from the weather to a murder. From the looks of it, not a serial-killer case, just a run-of-the-mill shooting in New Orleans East.
Mercifully, the jukebox had run out of quarters.
“Did you hear about the storm?” the bartender asked Murphy.
He shook his head. “I was on the phone.”
“Yesterday it was just a depression. Today it’s a tropical storm. They’re calling it Catherine. I guess it’s the third one this season, but I didn’t hear anything about the first two.”
The satellite imagery had shown the storm off the west coast of Africa.
“It’s too soon to get worked up about a storm that far out,” Murphy said. “And it’s too early in the season. The bad ones always come late.”
“Since Katrina, they all make me nervous.”
Murphy had three more beers, then drove his eight-year-old Toyota to his apartment and went to bed. He couldn’t fall asleep, so for a while he tried to read a Dennis Lehane novel, but he couldn’t concentrate. Not with Kirsten popping in and out of his head every few minutes.
Finally around noon he started to nod. He put the book down on his nightstand, turned out the bedside lamp, and closed his eyes.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Tuesday, July 31, 1:40 PM
She opens the door quickly, without so much as a peek. As if she doesn’t have a care in the world on this beautiful afternoon, along this safe, picturesque cul-de-sac.
Hasn’t she read the newspaper? Doesn’t she know there is a killer loose?
She is thirty-six, divorced, with two small children. Before she left her husband they had a lakefront address. Now she lives in this cozy two-story cottage that her husband bought as investment property. Last year in the divorce, she wrested sole ownership of it from him, along with custody of the children and a hefty monthly child-support check.
The killer’s research is thorough.
She steps into the doorway. Her brown hair is pulled into a long ponytail. She wears a blue T-shirt, thin cotton shorts, and sneakers.
“Can I help you?” she says, her dark eyes shining. She is slightly out of breath.
With the door open he can hear the rhythmic pump of up-tempo music mixed with a female voice giving instructions. It’s an exercise video. The woman was working out.
He is dressed in a white shirt, maroon tie, and dark dress pants. His car is parked at a shopping center almost a mile away. In his left hand he carries the Book of Mormon. “My name is Joseph Smith,” he says. “I’m with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.”
She frowns and takes a step backward. “I’m not really interested, but thank you.”
He steps closer and raises the book. “I won’t take but a minute of your time, ma’am. I promise. But can I just show you one thing from the Book of Mormon?”
A look of mild annoyance crosses her face as she glances up and down the street. Don’t Mormons always travel in pairs? Perhaps she senses danger. But it’s the middle of the day. The sun is shining. She lives in a safe, quiet neighborhood, an island paradise rising above a sea of filth.
He opens the book, careful to keep the brown cover facing the woman. Inside the pages, he has carved out a rectangular space. The task was harder than he thought, at least two hours hacking away with a box cutter twenty pages at a time until he reached the back cover.
Concealed inside the empty space is a one-million-volt stun gun he bought off the Internet for a hundred dollars. The Streetwise SW1000 has a hard plastic case, is only eight inches tall, two inches wide, and one inch thick. It fits perfectly inside the space he cut out of the Book of Mormon.
Powered by three nine-volt batteries, the stun gun delivers a devastating high-volt, low-amp blast that temporarily disrupts the central nervous system and will put a grown man on the ground. According to the manufacturer, the charge can travel though several layers of clothing.
He reaches toward the book with his right hand and closes his fingers around the stun gun. They tremble slightly. He has never used this device before.
In one swift movement, the killer rips the stun gun from inside the book and shoves the twin electric prongs against the woman’s chest, high above her breasts. He presses the activation button on the side of the device with his thumb, triggering the short electric explosion. As the million-volt shock slams through the woman’s central nervous system, her eyes roll back into her head and she collapses on the tile floor.