He spreads her arms and legs wide and then looks around for something to use for the rest of the ritual. She will get no physical contact from him because he has no interest in her whore’s flesh. But he will treat her like the whore she is. This one won’t feel it like the last one did, but her soul will know the Lord’s hand has reached out and touched her vile places.
She is his tenth sacrifice, and still no one has recognized his work. No one even knows he is here at all. But he has a plan. If this dead harlot doesn’t capture the attention of the police and the press, he knows what will. He has something more dramatic in mind, something much more dramatic.
CHAPTER FOUR
Wednesday, July 25, 8:00 AM
“This motherfucker must be crazy!” Detective Juan Gaudet said. “He kills this poor girl and dumps her body half a motherfucking mile from police headquarters.”
They were looking down at the naked corpse of another woman, this one under the South Jeff Davis overpass.
“Headquarters is just another empty building now,” Murphy said.
Gaudet took a deep breath. “Still…”
Murphy glanced at his partner. “Who are you talking about, anyway?”
“Don’t play with me, goddamnit. You know exactly who the fuck I’m talking about.
So you’re back with me on this?
I never left you on it. It just ain’t worth getting transferred to the Seventh District night watch over.
You agree this is the same guy?”
Gaudet squatted close to the dead woman’s midsection. His face tightened. “Look what he did to her, man.”
She lay on her back spread-eagled, with a rusty piece of steel rebar protruding a foot from her vagina. Her hands were missing.
“There’s not much blood,” Murphy said. “There’s a good chance she was dead when he did this.”
Gaudet stood. “This motherfucker is sick, you hear me, sick.
He’s a serial killer who mutilates women. He’s a fucking psycho.”
An hour ago a patrolman leaving lockup had spotted the body. The crime scene was a small patch of urban wasteland, in the middle of the city but out of sight from just about everywhere.
“Why take her hands?” Gaudet said.
Murphy shrugged. “Maybe he thinks that without fingerprints we won’t be able to identify her. Or maybe he took them for souvenirs.”
“What about the cable tie?” Gaudet said.
“What about it?”
“Why did he leave it this time but not last time?”
The woman’s eyes were bulged and bloodshot. Her tongue was black and swollen and hanging from her mouth.
“Maybe she died before he could remove it,” Murphy said. “Maybe he forgot his pocket knife.”
Gaudet stomped his feet in frustration. “Two victims in two days. I’m telling you, this motherfucker is crazy.” He bent over and tapped his pen against the hard plastic cable tie. “Where do you get these things?”
“Wal-Mart, Home Depot. They come in all sizes. He probably picked up a pack at a hardware store.”
“And once he puts it on there’s no way to get it off.”
Murphy shook his head. “You have to cut it.”
“They probably realize that,” Gaudet said. “His victims, I mean. They probably know there’s no way to get that thing off, that they’re going to die.”
“Probably.”
“How long you figure it takes?”
Murphy stared at the dead woman’s face. “About a minute before she blacks out. Three or four until she’s dead.”
The woman was young, early twenties, Murphy guessed. Other than some dental issues, probably from smoking crack, she wasn’t bad looking. Just the one tattoo, “Johnny’s Girl,” in script across the front of her thigh. If she could have gotten off the pipe, she might have had a chance at a decent life.
Murphy stepped away and started walking the crime scene.
A few minutes later, he found a black skirt and a pair of “fuck me” pumps lying against one of the concrete pylons, ten yards from the body.
A three-foot length of rusted steel rod lay just a few feet from the skirt and sandals. If the piece of rebar the killer had used on the victim was the same length as the one near the pylon, it meant he had shoved two feet of steel inside the woman. If she had been alive when he did it, she would have bled a lot more. Thank God for small favors.
Behind him, Gaudet said, “What are you going to do?”
“Give the rank one more chance to come clean about what’s going on.
And if they don’t?
If these girls knew there was a killer out here hunting them like animals, they’d be more careful. They wouldn’t get into cars with customers they don’t know. They could work in pairs, watch each other’s backs.”
“Or they could quit hooking,” Gaudet said.
“How likely is that?”
“And if the rank still won’t own up to the truth?”
“I’m going to do what I said.”
“Will she talk to you?”
Murphy nodded toward the body. “If it’s about a serial killer, yeah.
Hell hath no fury, my brother.”
How did the killer get her there?
It was a question Sean Murphy had been wrestling with since he first got to the South Jeff Davis crime scene.
He had shown a photo of the victim’s face to a couple of vice detectives. They knew her by sight but couldn’t remember her name. One of the vice cops remembered seeing her a couple of times working on Tulane near the courthouse.
There’s no way, Murphy thought, she would have walked the eight blocks from criminal district court to the Jeff Davis overpass with a john, not when the storm had left plenty of abandoned houses and empty buildings in between where she could knock out a two-minute blow job or a quick bend-over.
The logical answer was a car. Whether she’d gone voluntarily or involuntarily, the killer had driven her to the overpass.
Inside the Homicide office, sitting behind his shared desk-there were ten desks for sixteen detectives-Murphy typed out an intradepartmental memo, a Form 105, requesting that every platoon and shift commander in the city ask at roll call if any officer had seen anything suspicious or had taken note of any cars parked near Central Lockup, the still-abandoned police headquarters building, or the courthouse last night.
Since all interdepartmental memos had to go through the chain of command, Murphy figured his 105 would take a week to get into the hands of the people who would actually read it aloud at roll calls. Just enough time for anyone who saw anything suspicious to forget the details.
After dropping his memo in the captain’s in-box, Murphy drove to the ruined police headquarters building on Broad Street next to the courthouse. It was 1:00 PM. Gaudet had gone to court at ten o’clock that morning and said he expected to be there all day, waiting to testify in an old homicide case. Murphy decided to canvass the fourteen-square-block area between the courthouse and the crime scene, looking for surveillance cameras.
A thorough canvass had to be done on foot. It was too easy to miss something in a car. The area was bordered by Tulane Avenue, Broad Street, Perdido Street, and South Jeff Davis Parkway. It was a run-down, half-abandoned, trapezoid-shaped section of Mid-City, bisected down its long axis by Gravier Street. Small shotgun houses lined the interior thruways.
Katrina had dumped four feet of water onto the neighborhood and run everyone off. A lot of people hadn’t come back. In addition to police headquarters, the district attorney’s office, across the street from criminal district court, still stood empty. The DA had taken his people to a building on Poydras Street, not far from the Superdome. There were cameras outside the old DA’s building, but they hadn’t worked since the storm.
Three small businesses-a corner store, a hair salon, and a tire shop-provided the only commerce in the neighborhood, and by the look of things, all three were on life support. Only the tire shop had a security camera. Speedy’s Tires stood on the corner of South Rendon and Gravier, in the block adjacent to where the woman’s body had been found.