Gaudet smiled. “So how do we catch this sick fuck?”
“Any way we can.”
“Sparks,” city editor Gene Michaels shouted across the frenzied newsroom. Deadline was only a couple hours away. Everyone was pounding their keyboards.
Kirsten glanced up from her computer screen. She was busy working on tomorrow’s front-page story about the serial killer’s letter. She kept typing.
“Sparks, I need you,” Michaels shouted again.
Kirsten pushed herself up from her chair. She looked across the sea of heads at the city editor’s desk. Michaels was on his feet.
“What?” Kirsten said, hoping he picked up on the annoyance in her voice.
“Triple slaying on Freret Street.”
The newsroom din faded.
Kirsten grabbed her phone and waved it at him. Two seconds later, it rang.
Michaels didn’t bother with a greeting. “Since the command desk put out the call a couple of hours ago, there hasn’t been any chatter about it. I think Homicide must be using a secure frequency, something they almost never do.”
“He couldn’t have killed three women at one time?”
“It’s not three women,” Michaels said. “It’s a mother and her two children.”
“How do you know that?”
“A source at EMS just told me.”
“Jesus,” Kirsten said. “Still, that doesn’t sound like the serial killer, and I don’t have time to chase it down. I’m trying to finish my story for tomorrow.”
“You remember that call Detective Gaudet got right before he and Landry bolted out of our meeting?”
“Yeah.”
“As soon as I got back to my desk and flipped on my scanner, the command desk was dispatching detective and crime-lab units to Freret Street.”
Kirsten noticed a slight tremor in the editor’s voice. “I’ll make a call,” she said.
“Thanks.”
Kirsten hung up and dug through her imitation Prada handbag for her cell phone. She had Gaudet’s number saved. She rang his phone but the call went straight to voice mail. She didn’t bother leaving a message. Like Murphy, Gaudet never checked his messages. It was a cop thing.
Kirsten slung her briefcase over her shoulder and walked across the newsroom to Gene Michaels’s desk.
The city editor turned his chair to face her.
She noticed his face was a couple of shades whiter than its customary chalk color. Michaels was in his early sixties. Kirsten knew that he and his wife had lost a son several years ago. It was something he always carried with him. The news of the murder of two children had evidently hit him hard.
“I’ll go, but I need an extension on my deadline,” Kirsten said.
Michaels glanced at the clock radio on his desk. It was 7:05. Deadline was nine o’clock. “How much?”
“Eleven o’clock.”
He shook his head. “Ten is the best I can do.”
Kirsten nodded. “If this thing on Freret is a goose chase…”
“I have a bad feeling,” Michaels said. “I think the killer just stepped up, exactly like Murphy said he would.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Tuesday, July 31, 7:45 PM
Murphy stood outside the front door of the house on Freret Street using a flashlight to look for signs of forced entry, when he happened to glance down the driveway and see Kirsten pressed against the crime-scene tape, in the middle of a small scrum of reporters.
She was waving at him.
He ignored her.
She stuck two fingers in her mouth and whistled like a truck driver at a carload of naked cheerleaders.
Murphy stepped back inside the house. During the next hour, Kirsten called his cell phone six times.
At a quarter to nine, he stepped outside to get some fresh air. She was still there. A photographer stood next to her snapping pictures of Murphy.
Murphy walked down the driveway. He stood across the yellow tape from Kirsten. “You’re harder to get rid of than a dose of the clap,” he said.
Her eyes narrowed. “You should know.”
“What do you want?”
As the other reporters pressed in, sensing a fight, Kirsten nodded toward the yard next door, signaling she wanted to get away from her colleagues. “I need to talk to you.”
Murphy shook his head.
She didn’t let his refusal stop her. “Is this case connected to the serial-killer investigation?”
“As far as I know there is no serial-killer investigation.”
“Is it true the victims are a mother and her two young children?”
A talking head from TV was yammering into his cell phone, careful not to mess up his perfectly coiffed hair. He stopped talking when Kirsten mentioned dead children. “I’ll call you back,” he said into his phone. He looked at Murphy. “Is that true, about the kids?”
Murphy stared at the TV pretty boy. “You’re going to have to talk to the department’s public-information officer. I can give you his contact information if you need it.”
The other reporters started firing questions at him.
Murphy walked away.
Later, when he peeked through a front window, Kirsten was gone.
A neighborhood canvass produced half a dozen suspect descriptions. After putting them together, Murphy had a good idea who he was looking for: a short, tall, fat, thin, white, black man in his early twenties to his late fifties, who had been driving a van, riding a bicycle, jogging, and walking a dog.
One neighbor saw the dog take a dump in the yard and suggested Murphy test the poop for DNA.
The coroner’s investigator gave the bodies a quick examination before bagging them.
Unofficially, he confirmed the boy had been raped. The little girl showed no signs of sexual assault.
The mother had been sodomized and raped with something large and sharp, in all likelihood the bloody butcher’s knife on the kitchen counter.
Lab results would take a few days, a forensic technician said, but he told Murphy not to count on fingerprints. There didn’t appear to be any on the boy’s neck or on the handle of the knife.
As the word had spread about the horrific triple murder, local reporters formed a phalanx at the end of the driveway. Then the networks showed up-CNN, NBC, Fox, CBS-as well as news stations from as far away as Mobile, two and a half hours east of New Orleans. The scent of serial murder was in the air.
Captain Donovan and Assistant Chief DeMarco showed up and stood in front of the TV cameras. They talked a lot but said little, though DeMarco was finally forced to admit that several recent homicides now looked like the work of a single killer.
“Is that the same thing as a serial killer?” one reporter quipped.
“Yes, a single killer,” DeMarco repeated, ignoring the distinction and the reporter’s mocking tone.
At midnight, the crime lab called Murphy’s cell phone. The preliminary examination of the package the newspaper had received was complete. There were no prints on the envelope or the letter. A fingerprint taken from the severed finger had come back to a young black woman with several arrests for prostitution. The Bureau of Identification was working on getting a picture from her rap sheet to compare it to photos taken of the dead woman found under the Jeff Davis overpass.
By 2:00 AM the rank and the reporters were gone.
Murphy and Gaudet spent the next several hours helping the crime-lab techs comb the house for evidence. They vacuumed the carpet for hair fibers, bagged the kids’ bedding and all the rugs in the house, and took a laptop computer. They also collected every scrap of paper they could find-mail, receipts, bills, notes and pictures from the refrigerator, an address book, even the little girl’s diary.
At 9:00 AM, after fifteen hours at the crime scene, Murphy drove his beat-up Toyota to the coroner’s temporary, post-Katrina office-a old funeral parlor in Central City.
The sign out front that identified the business as the Rivas and Colbert Funeral Home had been covered with a blue FEMA tarp. The only indication of what the building was currently being used for was a sheet of printer paper taped to the glass front door that said ORLEANS PARISH CORONER’S OFFICE.