A Killer Like Me (21 page)

Next, he slices through the tape binding her wrists. Although her hands are free, she can barely move them because he has wound a long strip of tape around her chest and upper arms, cinching her elbows to her sides. The killer ties her wrists to the chair arms. He then uses a long piece of cord to lash her upper body to the back of the chair.

She leans forward and he hears her retch inside the pillowcase. Nausea and vomiting are common side effects of ether. She will drown in her own vomit if he doesn’t remove the gag from her mouth. He rips the tape from around her neck and pulls the pillowcase off her head. Her eyes are open but unfocused. Using his fingernails, he peels a corner of the tape away from her mouth, then yanks off the rest. He steps back as she throws up again.

When she finishes retching, her head slumps forward onto her chest.

The killer stares at her.

A few minutes later, she shakes her head, trying to clear the effects of the ether. But she is only partially conscious, not yet aware of the horror that awaits her. The killer’s eyes dart around the room, at the mattresses nailed to the walls, at the window panes painted black. He has created his own type of artist’s studio, a private killing room.

Saturday, August 4, 12:15
AM

The woman is awake now. The killer stands across the room, peering at her through the viewfinder of his new video camera. The memory card can record up to six hours of video that can be uploaded directly to his laptop computer. And from there to the Internet.

“Who are you?” she says, her speech slurred from the effects of the ether. She is still bound to the chair a dozen feet away.

The killer makes an adjustment to the camera and brings her features into sharper focus. She has dark eyes and long black hair.

“Why am I here?” she mumbles.

The only light in the blacked-out room comes from a bare twenty-five-watt bulb screwed into the ceiling fixture.

The killer flicks on the video camera’s built-in floodlight.

The woman squints against its harshness. “What do you want?” she says.

“I want you to shut up,” he says.

“Where am I?” she shouts in a hoarse voice.

The ether is wearing off. She is getting stronger. Still, the killer ignores her. He adjusts the zoom until the bottom of the screen lines up with a chalk line he drew on the floor in front of the chair.

“I’m a police officer,” she says. “If you don’t let me go—”

“You’re not a police officer,” he says as he tinkers with the white-balance adjustment.

“Yes, I am. You can call police headquarters and confirm it. The number is—”

“You’re a civilian employee at the crime lab. You’re separated from your husband, and you are now living with your police paramour. In addition to the sin of fornication, you are also guilty of abandoning your two children.”

“Listen to me.” A pleading quality has crept into her voice. “Nothing’s been done that can’t be undone. If you let me go, we can forget this ever happened. I swear I won’t report it.”

The killer doesn’t answer.

She starts to cry. “Let me go, please. I won’t tell anybody. I swear, I swear, I swear. Just please let me go.”

“I can’t,” he says. Then he presses the record button.

She notices the red LED light on the front of the camera. “What are you doing?”

His gym bag is on the floor behind her, in the narrow space between the chair and the wall. That way she will see him approach her empty-handed and perhaps think he is only going to molest her.

Rolled up and stuffed into the killer’s back pocket is a black ski mask. The Zodiac designed and made his own hood, a cowl really, with his special symbol—a circle with a cross through it—stitched into a front flap that hung down nearly to his waist, but the killer lacks sewing skills. A black ski mask, like those worn by terrorists in Iraq, was the best he could do.

He pulls the mask from his pocket and slips it over his head, adjusting it on his face so he can see through the eyeholes.

The sight of him donning the black mask unnerves the woman. “What are you doing?” she whimpers.

He walks toward her and into the camera’s view. Nothing about his clothes can reveal his identity. He bought his khaki pants and long-sleeve flannel shirt at a thrift store and paid cash.

The woman bucks in the chair, trying to overturn it. He can hear her breath coming in short, ragged gasps. “What . . . what are you going to do?”

He steps behind the chair and presses both hands down on her shoulders to steady her. He faces the camera. She struggles against his grip. “Be quiet,” he tells her. “I have something to say.”

She sits still.

He clears his throat, then addresses the camera.

“I am the Lamb of God. I am here to do his bidding. My faith will not be shaken, nor can my will be lessened. New Orleans is a city on the brink of the abyss. It cannot be saved except through fire and blood. Recently, you have seen both. Tonight you will see more. I will not stop until this city is purged of its sin. This harlot’s—”

The woman tries to twist her upper body away from his grip. With his left hand he squeezes her neck until she stops. He hopes the microphone picks up her frenzied breathing.

He continues.

“This harlot’s blood is on your hands, and more will follow, much more, until you give up your wicked ways and surrender to the Lord thy God.”

He bends toward his gym bag. The woman struggles to turn around, but he grabs her hair with his left hand and holds her still. When he stands back up, he clutches a two-foot-long Khyber knife in his right hand.

Looking straight into the electronic eye of his video camera, the killer says, “What I do, I do in his name. Elohim, Yahweh, Elah be praised.”

He jerks the woman’s head over the back of the chair and slashes her throat with the eighteen-inch blade.

Through the holes in his mask, he sees her eyes roll up toward his in horror as the life rushes out of them. He dumps the chair over sideways and presses his knee down on her body. He hacks at her neck with a sawing motion and feels the blade carve through muscle, tendon, and soft tissue. Then it grinds to a stop at the spine. He shifts his weight onto his shoulders and forces the knife edge down.

The bone cracks as the blade cuts through it. The woman’s head comes off. The wooden floor is awash in blood.

The killer stands and holds the severed head up in front of the camera. Blood pours from the neck. He is breathing hard, his heart racing. He tries to speak but can’t find his voice. He swallows hard and tries again.

“Elohim, Yahweh, Elah be praised!” he shrieks.

The killer is exhausted, but exhilarated. This day has been the longest of his life. Reflexively, he checks his watch. It’s 4:30
AM
.

He should have gone to sleep when he got home two hours ago, but he was eager to upload the video onto his laptop to see how it looked.

It’s good, very good.

He set up the camera’s angle of view perfectly and had not gone offscreen when he toppled the chair and cut off the harlot’s head. Now he wants to upload it to the Web for all the world to see.

This will shake them up.

The portal Web site is innocuous enough, the home page of an obscure gamer magazine, with tips, strategies, cheat codes, reviews of new games, and links to gaming hardware and software. It’s a legitimate Web site and probably even turns a profit. But beneath it lies a hidden site. A sinister world of darkness and pain.

The killer slides his finger across the touchpad on his laptop until the pointer hovers over the small letter
t
in the word
Triton
at the top of one of the Web site’s interior pages. When he positions the pointer in exactly the right spot it changes from an angled arrow to a hand, indicating a link to another page or another site. In this case, the link is to a different Web site, one not registered with Google, Yahoo, or any other search engines. And because the only link to the site is hidden inside another Web site, a technique called piggybacking, the search engines’ Web crawlers can’t find it.

The killer clicks the hidden link, and a new Web page opens in his browser. The new page is a blank screen with two empty boxes, one for a user name, the other for a password. The killer types his user name and password and presses the enter key. A second password box appears.

Access to the Web site requires three different passwords. All three must contain letters, numbers, and at least one special character: an asterisk, a percent sign, an ampersand, or any of the others symbols that run along the top of the number keys on a computer keyboard.

The killer types his remaining two passwords. The Web site opens. Across the top of his screen the name of the site appears—
DEVIL’S DEN.

Access to the site costs two hundred dollars a month. Setting up the payments is complicated and involves a double-blind system that uses international money orders instead of credit cards. Once a month the killer mails a money order to an address in Mexico.

In chat rooms connected to the Web site, he has learned that on the last day of each month, all of the customers’ money orders are cashed in for a single money order that is mailed to a bank in Eastern Europe. To protect the customers’ identities, no electronic money transfers of any kind are used and no records are kept other than user names and passwords, both of which, the Webmaster assures the site’s clients, are manually, not electronically, encoded.

It took the killer two months to get his account approved and set up, and like all new members he had to pay a one-time initiation fee of five hundred dollars.

The Devil’s Den is an amateur video swap shop featuring nearly every depravity known to man: bestiality, hardcore child-on-child and adult-on-child sex, necrophilia, self-mutilation, rape, beatings, stabbings, shootings, torture, and killings of all kinds. All filmed by the participants. It is the YouTube of perversion.

The site is broken down into fetishes. Subscribers can upload their own videos. New ones appear almost daily. The killer selects
MURDER
. The he clicks the upload link. A brief set of instructions appear. There is no warning label or age verification. Everything on the site is illegal in nearly every country in the world.

Below the instructions is a question that must be answered.

DO YOU WANT THIS UPLOAD TO BE PRIVATE OR PUBLIC
?

Two clickable buttons appear below the question, the first labeled
PRIVATE
, the second labeled
PUBLIC
.

The killer clicks the second button. A warning screen pops up.

ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT YOUR UPLOAD TO BE PUBLIC?

Two buttons appear below the questions:
YES
and
NO
. The killer clicks
YES
.

A second warning page appears.

PLEASE VERIFY THAT YOU WANT YOUR UPLOAD TO BE PUBLIC.

Below that, two more buttons:
VERIFY
and
CANCEL
.

The killer verifies that he wants his upload to be public.

Within the Devil’s Den Web site, private videos are indexed and are viewable by members only. Those videos marked for public viewing are stored on the site for members, but they are also uploaded through a redundant cutout system to a network of shifting, piggybacked Web sites in countries in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. One of the biggest such Web sites operates in North Korea. Most of the sites don’t require registration, and the videos can be viewed by anyone with access to the Internet. But their origins cannot be traced.

The killer selects the video file of the woman’s beheading from his hard drive and uploads it to the site. He then clicks a link to another screen and answers a few more questions. The Devil’s Den provides an extra service, for a fee payable by the last day of the current month. If the payment isn’t received, the member’s account will be canceled. A member whose account is canceled can open a new account—members’ names aren’t recorded anywhere—but that requires another five-hundred-dollar initiation fee.

Either way, the Webmaster gets his money.

The extra service, which costs two hundred fifty dollars, will send a link to the video to tens of thousands of e-mail addresses around the world, including those of journalists and bloggers. The mass e-mailings create a global buzz about the video. The more demented or perverted the video, the louder the chatter. Part of the reason the killer joined the Devil’s Den was so he could take advantage of this service.

As soon as he finishes making all of the arrangements, he logs out of the Web site, clears his browsing history, cache, and cookies, then shuts down his computer. He knows the police, and especially the FBI, have sneaky ways of extracting deleted files from a computer, but the police will never get that close to him. The Lord is with him.

Outside, he hears a car drive past, followed by the sound of a newspaper hitting his driveway. He looks toward the sliding glass door and sees the first hint of daylight shining through. He knows the newspaper will have a big story about the fire. Maybe several stories. But he is too tired to go outside. He has been awake for twenty-four hours, and his exhaustion has finally overtaken his exhilaration. He does not have to be at work again until Monday, so he can sleep all day. The newspaper can wait.

Soon they’ll find the woman’s body. Soon they’ll discover the video. Then all hell will break loose.

The killer slides into bed and pulls the covers up to his chin. It has been a good day, a good couple of days. He closes his eyes.

Saturday, August 4, 8:10
AM

“If I was you, I’d stay out of the office today,” Gaudet said. “With all the shit we got going on, I’m sure the captain is going to be there.”

Murphy and Gaudet were at the Coffee House on Canal Boulevard, sitting at a table in the back. A copy of that morning’s
Times-Picayune
lay between them, along with their breakfast bill. Murphy’s police radio was on top of the newspaper and the bill to keep the ceiling fan from blowing them off the table. Murphy shot another angry glance at the headline.