“I’ve never heard of a detective catching a killer based on a profile.” Murphy glanced at his watch then held up his hands. “That’s all the questions I have time for.”
The sound of discontent echoed through the classroom.
Murphy turned away from the lectern.
“When are you going to hold another briefing?” someone shouted.
“I’ll let you know,” Murphy said over his shoulder on his way out the door.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Sunday, August 5, 11:50 AM
As soon as Kirsten Sparks got back to the Times-Picayune ’s offices on Howard Avenue, she walked straight to Gene Michaels’s cubicle. The city editor was hunched over, staring at a sheet of paper on his desk, his reading glasses resting on the end of his nose.
“How did it come in?” Kirsten asked.
Michaels swiveled in his chair and looked up at her over the top of his glasses. “Through the mail slot.”
“When?”
“The sports editor found it in the drop box an hour ago.”
“Any postage?”
Michaels shook his head.
“That means the killer hand-delivered it,” Kirsten said.
“Or somebody did it for him.”
“We have a camera at the door.”
“Milton is downstairs with security right now going over the video.”
Kirsten pointed to the letter Michaels had told her about when he called her away from Murphy’s press briefing. “What’s it say?”
He handed it to her. “That’s a copy.”
She read the latest letter from the Lamb of God Killer.
When she finished, she looked at Michaels. “It’s obvious it’s not a crank. The writer uses the same k ’s for hard c ’s and the same double-consonant pattern as the first letter.”
“I agree.”
“What about the two murders in the French Quarter he mentions?”
“Go down to the library and pull every French Quarter homicide story for the last two years,” Michaels said. “Concentrate on unsolved cases-”
“I can do that from my desk.”
Michaels shook his head. “The archive server is down. The IT department said they would fix it tomorrow, but with this storm… who knows? Pam can access the backup system.”
Kirsten shrugged. She didn’t like the cramped world of the basement library, but she put the thought out of her head. She had to focus on the story, the biggest of her career. “This letter is news, Gene. If we’re still calling ourselves a newspaper, we need to run it.”
“Redfield is meeting with Darlene and the legal department right now.”
“What about NOPD?”
“That’s one of the things they’re discussing.”
“We haven’t notified them yet?” Kirsten said.
The city editor shook his head.
“They’re going to want to test the letter and the envelope for DNA, fingerprints, fibers, whatever is possible to get from paper,” Kirsten said.
“You know what I know, and that’s that the big chiefs are talking about it. I’m just a little chief.”
“Can you imagine how the mayor is going to feel when he reads this?” Kirsten said.
Michaels nodded. “I know.”
Everyone in the city, and since Katrina, nearly everyone in the country, knew about the mayor’s habit of making asinine off-the-cuff remarks. Several times his comments had gotten him into trouble. But this time, it looked like Mayor Ray Guidry’s mocking comments were going to get his daughter killed.
Kirsten scanned the letter again. “It seems like he’s laughing about the cipher, like he either knows we can’t crack it or…”
“Or it doesn’t mean anything,” Michaels said.
“What do you think?”
Michaels shrugged. “Phil Grady on the people desk was a communications specialist in the navy. He knows something about codes. He took a look at it, but I don’t think he got anywhere.”
“The cops sent it to the FBI,” Kirsten said, “but it takes months to get anything back from them. And that’s only if it’s a real code.”
Michaels’s phone rang. He picked it up and listened for about thirty seconds. Then he said, “Okay,” and hung up.
He turned to Kirsten. “That was Redfield. We’re going to run the letter tomorrow.”
Ten minutes later, Kirsten walked into the Times-Picayune library. The cramped two-room office lay buried in the basement, where broken office furniture and broken down journalists came to die.
For more than a century, reporters had called the place where newspapers kept indexed records of old stories the morgue, but time and the inexorable creep of political correctness had forced the industry to change the name to library. Kirsten wasn’t sure why the PC police had demanded the change. She guessed it was the same reason why the familiar yellow road signs that warned of a dead end had been replaced by signs that read NO OUTLET. Maybe the dead were easily offended.
She preferred the name morgue. It fit the funeral-parlor atmosphere of the place.
Pam Elder, the Times-Picayune librarian, sat at her desk in the middle of the windowless room. She was in her midfifties, heavy, with pasty white skin. She looked like she was about to have lunch, two Twinkies and a can of Diet Coke. “What brings you down here?” she said.
“The archive server is down, and I need to search for some old stories.”
“I can pull them from the backup system,” Elder said before she bit off half a Twinkie.
Rumor was that Elder had once been a reporter, but for nearly two decades she had been in the basement, hidden away like some crazy old aunt. In her dank office, stacks of old newspapers occupied nearly every flat surface, and file cabinets stood against every foot of wall space. Piled on top of the cabinets were reference volumes of almost every kind, as well as telephone books, maps, and old city directories. A film of dust overlaid everything.
The adjoining office was a storeroom, crammed with horizontal files of newspaper clippings and drawers filled with reels of microfilm. Not much of it was used anymore. The newspaper had been archiving stories electronically for twenty years, and online references had superseded those printed on paper.
“What are you looking for?” Elder said.
“Two murders in the French Quarter that happened at least a year ago, maybe as far back as two years. Both unsolved, both probably involving gay men.”
Elder polished off the first Twinkie and wiped her hands on a paper napkin. “I thought you were on the serial-killer story.”
“I am,” Kirsten said, a little surprised Elder kept up with the outside world. “I think the killer may have murdered two gay men before he started killing prostitutes.”
The librarian bit into her second Twinkie and washed it down with Diet Coke she slurped through a red and white straw. Then she slid the can and the rest of the Twinkie aside and pulled her keyboard closer. “Let’s see what we’ve got on file.”
Kirsten walked around the librarian’s desk to get a view of her computer screen.
“What search parameters do you want to use?” Elder asked.
“Set the date range from two years ago to one year ago,” Kirsten said. “Search for the words killing, homicide, and French Quarter. Let’s see what that comes up with.”
The librarian typed in the data and hit the enter key.
A few seconds later, the search returned more than one hundred stories. The list of headlines was sorted by date, the most recent stories first.
Elder rolled her chair back a little and took another pull from her Diet Coke as Kirsten leaned closer to the screen to scan the headlines.
“That’s a lot of stories to read,” Elder said.
“Add the word gay to the search.”
That cut the list to twenty stories.
A headline near the bottom of the screen caught Kirsten’s eye:
MURDERED PRIEST SAID TO HAVE BEEN GAY.
Kirsten tapped a fingernail against the screen. “Pull that one up.”
When Elder clicked the hyperlinked headline, the story opened in a separate window. The article was a follow-up about a Catholic priest found murdered in a hotel room in the French Quarter. The story was dated eighteen months ago. Homicide detectives found hundreds of gay pornographic videos in the rectory of Saint Patrick Catholic Church Tuesday as they searched the private living quarters of the Rev. Ramon Gonzalez. The nude body of Gonzalez, a Cuban immigrant, was found last week in a French Quarter hotel room. Coroner’s officials said the popular priest had been stabbed at least 40 times…