A Killer Like Me (7 page)

“No she doesn’t.”

Kirsten shook her head. “Don’t bullshit a bullshitter, Murphy. She hated me, which was why going to visit her was about as much fun as chewing on tinfoil and shaving my head with a cheese grater.”

“Well . . . she hates everybody, including me.”

“I know you didn’t come here to talk about your mother, and I’m running late. What do you want?”

“I’ve got a story for you,” he said.

She shook her head again. “I’m not on the cops beat anymore, as you so humorously put it.”

“It’s a big story.”

Kirsten stepped out onto the porch and forced Murphy to back up. “I really have to go.” She turned around and locked the dead bolt, then walked past him.

“It’s about a serial killer,” he said.

She was on the bottom step when she turned around. “What serial killer?”

Murphy had known, at least hoped, that those two words would hook her. Kirsten was too good of a reporter for them not to. Now he had to follow through with the promise those words held. “We have a serial killer murdering women in New Orleans,” he said, the words tumbling out in a heap. “So far he’s killed eight that I know of.”

“Bullshit.”

“It’s true,” he said.

She stared at him for a second, mouth partly open, the tip of her tongue running along the top row of her teeth. Her teeth were whiter than he remembered them. Almost sparkling. “Why haven’t I heard about him?” she said.

“The rank is keeping a lid on it.”

“So why are you telling me?”

Murphy took a deep breath. “He’s killing prostitutes. They can’t protect themselves unless they know they’re in danger.”

Kirsten shook her head. “If someone has killed eight prostitutes, don’t you think the rest of them already know about it? I know you, Murphy. What’s your real reason?”

He hesitated. He considered. He formulated an answer suitable for a public servant. Then he rejected it. Instead, he looked in her eyes. “I can catch him.”

Once he said it out loud, once he stripped away all the pretense and the pseudo-sentimentality about protecting the public, Murphy realized that all of his badgering of the rank, all of his complaining about their inaction—everything—boiled down to that one simple statement.
I can catch him.

Murphy was a homicide cop. The man he was after was a killer. It was the same reason dogs chased cats. It was the natural order of things.

“Are you heading a task force?” she asked.

Murphy shook his head.

“Why not?”

“The rank is in denial. They say the murders aren’t connected.”

“What makes you think they are?”

“The cause of death has been strangulation. The victims all shared common characteristics. Geographically, there are also certain similarities.”

“Prostitution is a dangerous occupation.”

“It’s the same guy, Kirsten. I know it. And when you hear the facts, you’ll know it. I said I can catch him, but I can’t do it alone. If the story breaks in the paper, the rank will have to respond. They’ll have to give me a task force.”

“Like I said, why me?”

“If you were me, who would you tell?”

She pulled a notebook from her purse and stepped back onto the porch. She took a seat on the swing. “Tell me what you know.”

Murphy told her the story, leaving out only the part about the cable ties. All he said about the cause of death was that the victims had been strangled. Holding back exactly how they had been strangled would help weed out the nutty confessors and copycats. It was something only the cops and the killer knew.

“Why won’t the department acknowledge that a serial killer is murdering prostitutes?” Kirsten said. “What are they afraid of?”

Murphy was sitting next to Kirsten on the swing, though he noticed she was careful to keep some distance between them.

“Serial killers attract attention,” he said. “Feds, the national media, self-proclaimed experts, kooks, bounty hunters, psychics—they all descend on the city. The rank doesn’t want that. Because of all the heat we took after Katrina, there was talk about disbanding the police department and letting the state police and the National Guard take over permanently. Most of that talk has died down, but there are still some state legislators who think that might be the best thing for the city. And that terrifies the rank.”

Kirsten stood and walked across the porch. She leaned against the far railing, her notebook and pen still in her hand. “This city is full of killers. Do they think one more is really going to matter, especially one killing prostitutes? Every second or third year we’re the murder capital of the country. Tourists can’t even walk in the French Quarter anymore without getting robbed.”

“Are you going to write the story?”

Kirsten glanced at her watch. “Of course I’m going to write it. It’s a big story. Scratch that. It’s a huge story.”

“You’ve got to keep my name out of it.”

“Somebody has to go on the record, Murphy. I can’t run a story this controversial with just an anonymous source.”

“The last time I went on the record with you I got fired.”

“How am I going to attribute it?”

“You’re the reporter.”

“The managing editor is going to want to know who my source is before he’ll even consider letting me publish quotes without a name attached to them.”

“I don’t care who wants to know. You can’t tell anyone where you got this information. PIB will come after me again, and this time they’ll make it permanent.”

“They didn’t fire you for talking to the press,” Kirsten said. “They fired you for blowing the lid on something they were trying to keep hidden. What you did took a lot of guts.”

“The rank considered it a betrayal.”

“Why, because you arrested a drug dealer and refused to throw the case?”

“Because I embarrassed the mayor.”

“His brother had a kilo of cocaine in his car. He should have gone to prison, not rehab.”

For all of Kirsten’s big-city-reporter cynicism, she really was naive, Murphy thought. Given enough spins of the wheel, she believed the world was supposed to come out fair, and that right would triumph over wrong, good over evil. It was sweet. Too bad it was wrong.

“PIB doesn’t like getting beat,” Murphy said. “And if you beat them, they come back at you with a vengeance. I’ve seen it happen before.”

“That was three years ago. I think you’re paranoid. If they were going to do something to you, they would have done it by now.”

“Are you going to keep my name out of the story?”

Kirsten looked at Murphy for a long few seconds. Then she nodded.

“Thanks,” he said.

She looked at her watch. “I missed the budget meeting. The city editor’s going to have a fit.”

Murphy stood. “Not when he finds out what’ve you got.”

She flipped through the pages of her notebook. “You really think he’s going to move away from prostitutes and start killing . . .”

“Normal women?” Murphy said.

“I know that sounds terrible but—”

“We call them true victims, people who don’t do things that are likely to get them killed, regular tax-paying citizens. And yeah, I think that’s what he’s going to do.”

“Didn’t you go to some FBI school on serial killers?”

“It was only a weeklong course.”

“Did they teach you anything there, or did you spend your time trying to get into the pants of some FBI chick?”

When Murphy didn’t respond, Kirsten turned and walked down the steps.

He followed her. His Taurus was parked at the curb behind her Volvo. He stopped beside her car as she slid behind the wheel. “Just keep my name out of it,” he said.

Kirsten turned and looked at him. “I will.”

Friday, July 27, 4:50
PM

Murphy stood at the door holding a last-minute arrangement of flowers he had picked up at a supermarket. He knocked but there was no answer. He opened the door and stepped inside. The stench of stale cigarettes almost knocked him down.

“Mother?” he called out.

The apartment was small, even by single-bedroom, retirement-community standards. A sitting room, a kitchenette, and a bedroom, with a bathroom the size of a telephone booth wedged in the middle. Even so, the place was eating a hole through Murphy’s paycheck.

Overflowing ashtrays occupied nearly every flat surface. A film of nicotine covered everything else. Through the open bathroom door, he saw the vanity in its normal state of disorder, a jumble of medicine bottles, beauty products, and potions, along with another ashtray piled high with cigarette butts.

He found her on the balcony, a space just big enough for a lawn chair and a garden table. Her third-floor view looked down on a pair of tennis courts that Murphy had never seen anyone use. He squeezed onto the balcony, hoping to catch enough fresh air to breathe.

“Where have you been?” his mother said, her voice coming out in that same screech that had grated on his nerves his entire life. Memories from childhood. Every evening his mother standing on the front porch, shrieking for him in her vodka-soaked slur: “Sean Patrick Murphy, get yourself home this instant. It’s supper time.”

A couple of older neighborhood boys teased him about it daily at the bus stop until he worked up the nerve to smash one of them in the head with his seventh-grade science book. He took a beating, but they stopped teasing him.

His mother twisted her head around to look at him. “Did you hear me? I said, where have you been?”

Murphy dropped the flowers on the glass-topped table, next to a half-filled ashtray and a half-empty highball glass. His mother didn’t even acknowledge the flowers. “I’ve been busy, Mother. I’m a homicide detective in the murder capital of the United States.”

“You don’t think your sister’s busy, a single mother with a special-needs child? Still, she manages to call me every day to ask how I’m feeling.”

Murphy stared at the tennis courts. “Theresa is a saint, mother. You should have had twins when you had her. Then you could have skipped me altogether.”

“Don’t talk about your sister like that. I didn’t say she was a saint. Lord knows she has bad taste in men—or maybe it’s just all men are bad—but she’s a good daughter and a good mother to that boy.”

Not quite good enough to help pay for this place, Murphy thought.

He regretted the thought as soon as he had it. His big sister, older by two years, had a full plate. Her husband had left her four years ago, not long after he and Theresa found out their son was autistic.

“That boy, by the way, your six-year-old grandson, has a name. It’s Michael.”

Murphy glanced back through the glass door and saw a bottle of Grey Goose on the kitchen counter. Living on Social Security, with her policeman son having to take up the financial slack, she still bought the good stuff.

“You know Mr. Meyer, the old man down the hall in three ten?” his mother said.

She glanced up at him and dropped her voice into a conspiratorial whisper. “He’s Jewish, you know.” Then she went back to her normal, nerve-fraying bray. “Well, I just found out he went to Notre Dame. I told him you were on the football team there. Turns out he played football too. I didn’t even know Jews played football, did you?”

“I hear they let them do all kinds of things now that the war is over.” His mother’s latent racism, homophobia, and anti-Semitism had always irritated him, mainly because she would deny to her dying day—and truly believe it—that she was any of those things.

“Are you being a smart aleck?” she said. “You sound just like your father.”

“I was on the football team for one season, and I only played in two games, both of which we lost.”

“Notre Dame, though, that’s something,” she said, more to herself than to him.

The coach might have kept him on the team the next year, but Murphy never found out. He came home that summer and never went back. His mother needed somebody to look after her. By that time, Murphy’s dad had been dead almost five years, dropped by a heart attack in the kitchen at age forty-nine. Theresa was off on some adventure or another with her boyfriend, hiking across India, or Pakistan, or some other godforsaken place. “That Protestant boy” was how his mother always described her future son-in-law.

Theresa transferred to UC Berkeley that spring to get a master’s in neonatal nursing. And most likely to get away from their mother. Murphy stayed home. It was what his father would have expected of him. Someone had to take care of Mother.

“Your sister’s thinking about taking a teaching position at the hospital,” his mother said. “She’s thinking about getting out of that . . . that ward she’s been in for so long.”

“Neonatal intensive-care unit,” Murphy said as he stared down at his mother’s head, at her thinning white hair, her flaky red scalp, and thought, not for the first time, about bashing in her skull, maybe with her favorite ashtray, the five-pound granite one she bought on a trip with Dad to the Grand Canyon. Just to get her to shut up about Theresa.

Murphy loved his sister, but she lived in San Francisco. She came home two, maybe three times a year. Sure, she called every day—with nationwide cell-phone plans, it was practically free—but she never sent a check.

Again, Murphy regretted his own thoughts. Maybe he should take some time off and fly out to visit Theresa and Michael. The kid was probably ready for a Giants game. His autism didn’t stop him from much. He was smart. He was funny. And somehow, probably because of his innocence, he made Murphy feel good.

“I might go see her,” Murphy said.

“Who?”

“Theresa.”

His mother craned her neck to look up at him. “Not without me you’re not.”

Murphy thought again about the granite ashtray, but he swallowed the thought. “Maybe we can both go,” he said.

“You know how I hate airports. All that walking. I can’t do it anymore.”

“You’re sixty-eight, Mother. We’ve had presidents older than you. People in their seventies run global corporations, and run marathons. Maybe if you laid off smoking and gave up booze you might feel better.”

She turned away. “There you go with the criticism again. You’re exactly like your father, you know that? He was no saint, let me tell you. He gambled. He drank. He smoked. Most of the time when he came home he smelled like a brewery.” She reached for her highball glass and drained it.