“I’ve got calls out to everybody I know, but all I’ve got so far is an official denial from the police department. My source was at the scene, though. He saw Murphy running the investigation. We’ve at least got enough to mention a possible link between the fire and the serial killer.”
“I’ve got to go to Milton on this,” Michaels said. “Meanwhile, keep working your sources. If you get confirmation we’ll put it on A-1 and shove it up TV’s ass.”
Taking the woman alive was easier than the killer thought. One touch with the stun gun. Some duct tape around her ankles, arms, and wrists. Then a pillowcase over her head.
He can hear her in the trunk, her cries muffled through the tape covering her mouth.
Driving down Saint Claude Avenue, the killer enters the neighborhood known as Bywater, part of the Ninth Ward, a section of New Orleans made infamous by constant TV news coverage after Katrina that showed eight feet of water in the streets and people stranded on rooftops. But that was the Lower Ninth Ward, on the other side of the Industrial Canal.
On this side of the canal, the flooding was less severe, and in the five blocks between Saint Claude and the river there had been no flooding at all.
Bywater is a maze of single-lane, one-way streets. The killer turns right on Bartholomew, then threads his way through the neighborhood, eventually stopping beside a two-story building on Burgundy Street at the corner of Mazant.
The clapboard-sided building is more than a hundred years old and was once a grocery store. The front door is built into a corner and faces the intersection of the two streets. A first-floor overhang, supported by wooden columns, covers both adjacent sidewalks.
The killer pulls his Honda to the curb on the Mazant side, just past the driveway that runs behind the building. He gets out of his car and approaches a pair of wrought-iron gates that enclose the end of the driveway. The gates are chained together and secured with a padlock. He opens the lock and pushes aside the gates. Then he backs his car into the driveway, stopping just a few feet from a door that leads into the rear of the building.
It’s almost midnight. The driveway is shrouded in darkness.
The killer pulls a nylon gym bag from the backseat and sets it next to the building’s rear door. Then he stands a few feet behind the car and unlocks the trunk. As he expected, the woman is a coiled spring. She lashes out with her feet, but because her ankles are taped together she has no leverage.
In his right hand the killer grips his stun gun, its nylon lanyard looped around his wrist. He steps forward and jams the electric contacts against the woman’s exposed thigh. He triggers the device and watches as she convulses hard, her muscles locked in an agonizing spasm that lasts several seconds.
The killer engages the safety on the stun gun and shoves it into his front pocket. He steps over to the gym bag and pulls out a plastic water bottle filled with a clear liquid. Holding the sixteen-ounce bottle at arm’s length, he twists off the cap. He can smell the powerful fumes.
The woman lies on her back, moaning and twitching. She is clothed only in a short pajama set, bright orange boxer shorts and a matching tank top. The pillowcase covering her head is cinched around her neck with duct tape. Her wrists are taped together in front.
The killer steps closer, holding the plastic bottle out in front of him. He moves his hand, centering it over her face. Then he tips the bottle and spills a little bit of the ether onto the pillowcase.
He steps back and screws the top on quickly, afraid of the effect the fumes may have on him. For a moment, the woman seems revived. She struggles against her bonds and twists her head from side to side. He hears her take a deep breath and hold it, but her pathetic attempt to avoid the fumes filling the pillowcase is already too late. The deep breath she took was filled with ether, and by holding it in she is merely accelerating the passage of the gas from her lungs into her bloodstream, and then into her brain.
Within sixty seconds she stops moving. Unconscious, not dead, the killer hopes. He has never used ether before and is unsure of the dosage. His first thought was chloroform. He has seen it used in movies and on television a thousand times, but while searching the Internet for a chloroform supplier, he stumbled upon an article about diethyl ether.
According to his research, doctors began using ether as a general anesthetic in the mid-1800s, nearly two decades before the Civil War. Modern medical practitioners, particularly in Western countries, have long since replaced ether, which is highly flammable, with safer anesthetic agents, but developing countries still use it because of its reliability, its low cost, and its high therapeutic index-the margin of safety between an effective dose and a lethal one. Currently, ether is used mainly as a laboratory cleaning solvent and by hophead kids for a cheap high, and to some extent, by homeopathic healers and alternative-medicine types.
The killer found a homeopathic medical supplier on the Internet that sells ether. Although the supplier doesn’t sell to individuals, it was simple enough to set up a corporate account for a bogus homeopathic store with a Mid-City address. He bought the pint of ether for twenty dollars and had it delivered to his door by UPS.
His captive is smalclass="underline" five feet three inches, perhaps 115 pounds. He selected her partly because of her size-he knew he was going to have to carry her-and partly for who she is and what she has done.
She is a thirty-two-year-old civilian employee of the New Orleans Police Department Crime Laboratory whose husband filed for divorce last year. In his lawsuit, the husband said his wife had been unfaithful to him. She had moved out of their marital home and was shacked up with a policeman. The couple has two children, whom the cheating wife has left in the custody of her cuckolded husband.
Capturing her was fairly simple, though the killer was nervous at first. There was nothing to picking up a prostitute on the street. That was easy. Even getting a woman to open her door to a well-dressed stranger in the middle of the afternoon hadn’t been difficult. But snatching a woman late at night from her home and taking her with you, that was a challenge.
But with God’s help, he met that challenge.
The killer waited until the boyfriend drove away, probably for work, in his black Ford Crown Victoria that looked very much like an unmarked police car. After the woman went to bed, he used a foot-long screwdriver to pry open the back door. He worked quickly and made no attempt at stealth.
Then he concealed himself in the den and waited. Within seconds, the woman stumbled out from her bedroom to investigate the noise of the break-in, wearing nothing but pajamas and carrying a small pistol. As she passed him, the killer jammed the stun gun into her neck and pressed the trigger. Then he trussed her up and threw her into the trunk of his Honda. Since he knows nothing about guns and has no need for them, he left the pistol on the floor where it had fallen.
At Mazant and Burgundy, the killer lifts the unconscious woman out of the trunk and lays her across his shoulders in a fireman’s carry. Standing at the back door, already straining under the weight, he stoops to retrieve his gym bag, then unlocks the door and steps inside the dark building.
The door opens onto a small foyer tucked beneath a wooden staircase. Beyond the foyer is a large open room. Straight across is a kitchen and a bathroom. Diagonally across, to the killer’s right, is an open doorway leading to a second room, almost as large as the first. On the other side of that room is the front door. There is no furniture.
Last year, the killer saw a flyer advertising the building for rent for two thousand dollars a month. With two big open rooms on the ground floor and living space upstairs, including bedrooms, a bathroom, and a small galley kitchen, the flyer billed the property as ideal for a pair of artist’s studios. Or since there was also a full-sized kitchen downstairs, as a large, single-family home with an open floor plan.