A Killer Like Me (23 page)

How does the killer pick them?

Sandra Jackson’s boyfriend had identified a photo of a butterfly tattoo on the shoulder of the dead woman found on the levee. When Murphy and Gaudet rolled the body, they saw the killer’s signature—“LOG”—carved into her flesh. They also discovered pry marks on the door of the house she shared with the narcotics cop.

But why her? Why Sandra Jackson?

The cop’s house was in Gentilly, a middle-class, multiracial downtown neighborhood. Jackson was thirty-two, a civilian employee at the crime lab. She drove a Pontiac. When she left her husband and two kids, she moved in with the cop she had been seeing on the side. There had been no record of domestic violence with her husband or her boyfriend.

Carol Sue Spencer was thirty-six, close in age to Jackson but different in every other respect. Spencer had been from uptown money. She didn’t work; she played tennis. She drove a BMW. When she separated from her husband, she moved into one of their investment properties.

Why Sandra Jackson? Why Carol Sue Spencer?

At noon, Murphy walked into the clerk of court’s office. Saturday hours were 11:00
AM
to 3:00
PM
. He pulled everything the clerk had on Jackson and Spencer. It wasn’t much. Spencer had been issued two traffic tickets in the last five years. Jackson had no tickets, probably because she worked for the police department. Both women had been married in New Orleans. Spencer’s marriage lasted thirteen years. Jackson’s lasted five. Both had been divorced within the last year.

A rail-thin deputy clerk in his fifties with a hooked nose and a smoker’s cough checked the secretary of state’s corporations database for Murphy. Neither victim was listed as the owner or an officer of any company. According to the registrar of voters, Spencer was a Republican. Jackson was a Democrat.

Two women separated by income, by neighborhood, by social status, with practically nothing in common, yet both ended up dead at the hands of the same killer. From a homicide investigator’s perspective, there was nothing unusual in that. Murder was often random.

Something that did strike Murphy as unusual, perhaps beyond randomness, was how much the two dead women resembled each other. Looking at their driver’s-license photos, he realized they could have been sisters. Both had dark eyes and dark hair that fell past their shoulders. Spencer was slightly taller than Jackson, but of course, you couldn’t tell that simply by looking at their pictures. Jackson was petite. Spencer, whom Murphy had seen nude during her autopsy, had an athletic build.

When Murphy took a closer look at Carol Sue Spencer’s and Sandra Jackson’s divorce cases, he noticed something else unusual. Both women were listed as the defendants. Their husbands had filed for the divorces. Both had cited adultery as the grounds.

Louisiana was a no-fault state, and Murphy knew that most divorce suits cited the catch-all grounds of “irreconcilable differences.” Few people bothered to claim adultery in their petitions anymore because there was no legal advantage to it. Often, it just complicated the process.

Digging through the divorce records, Murphy could find no other correlation between the two women. They had not used the same divorce attorney. Neither had their husbands. They hadn’t been to the same marriage counselor. There was no connection between the women except that they looked eerily similar and had both been accused of cheating on their husbands.

Murphy skimmed through the computerized records of every divorce case finalized in New Orleans during the past twelve months. Of the more than two hundred cases, in only twenty-eight had the wife been accused of adultery. He pulled all twenty-eight case files.

The files didn’t include photographs, but they did contain basic biographical information. The killer seemed to have recently developed a taste for middle-class white women, so Murphy eliminated black divorcees. He had thirteen files left. Then, on a hunch, he eliminated women younger than twenty-five and older than forty. That left just seven.

Just before the office closed, Murphy told the hook-nosed deputy clerk that he needed to check out the files.

The clerk hacked up a wet gob of goo from the tar pit at the bottom of his lungs and spit it into a soiled handkerchief. “You have to have them back by Tuesday,” he wheezed.

Murphy nodded. He knew about the seventy-two-hour rule. Police officers could check out original files if they were part of a criminal investigation, but they had to be returned after three days, weekends included. Every file in the office was scanned into a computer database, and it used to be that detectives could get a printout of the entire file. A few years ago, when a new clerk of court was elected and she found out how much her office was spending on printing costs, she started letting working cops check out the original files for seventy-two hours.

The clerk pulled a logbook from the shelf beneath the counter and laid it open in front of Murphy. Each page of the log had been divided into columns. Murphy printed and signed his name, wrote his badge number in the appropriate column, and jotted down the case name and docket number of each file.

Then he carried the files to the NOPD Records Division.

Two hours later, he had driver’s-license photos of six of the women. One woman did not have a Louisiana license, and the Records Division could not access photos for out-of-state licenses.

Of the six women, only three looked anything like Carol Sue Spencer and Sandra Jackson. Their ages were thirty, thirty-one, and thirty-five. All had dark eyes and dark hair.

Murphy laid the three pictures side by side and stared at them. He let his mind go free.

I am the killer. Whom do I choose?

He had picked thirty-five-year-old Marcy Edwards. He didn’t know why. Something about the confident way she looked at the camera.

Murphy had been sitting in front of her house since eight o’clock.

He lit another cigarette.

His police radio and cell phone lay on the passenger seat. Both were turned off. To get inside this killer’s head he needed to disconnect from all of that noise and clutter.

Murphy had not cracked the Houma case by brilliant detective work. He had cracked it by crawling inside the mind of the killer and figuring out how he thought. He did that by spending night after night hanging out on the corners where the potential victims were, the street hustlers and the winos.

It was an approach Murphy had learned during a single semester of acting class at Notre Dame twenty years ago. The instructor had been a devotee of the Lee Strasberg school of method acting. Murphy had only taken the class because it sounded like an easy A, something he needed to keep his GPA high enough to maintain his football eligibility. He did so well in the class, though, that he was cast in a supporting role in the theater department’s next play.

After leaving Notre Dame, Murphy didn’t think about acting again until he became a detective. Then he found Strasberg’s technique of getting inside the character’s head, of becoming the character, more useful than most of the investigative techniques he had been taught.

That’s why he was parked on Wingate Drive at ten o’clock at night watching a woman’s house. He needed to know what it was like to be the Lamb of God Killer.

Saturday, August 4, 9:30
PM

The awards banquet is being held in the Pelican Room on the fourth floor of Harrah’s Hotel on Poydras Street.

The killer doesn’t need to be here. He knows where the young woman lives. The address of her off-campus apartment became public record a few months ago when she applied for a restraining order against a former boyfriend. He is here because he wants to see her. He even dressed for the occasion in what Mother calls his Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes: khaki pants, white shirt, maroon tie, and blue sport coat.

The ballroom is cloaked in semidarkness as he slips through the double doors. The house lights shine on a middle-aged man standing behind the lectern at the front of the room. He is speaking about some notable person, listing that person’s string of accomplishments. The room is filled with at least twenty-five circular tables, each accommodating about a dozen well-dressed men and women eating, drinking, some even listening to the speaker.

The banquet is scheduled to end at ten o’clock and appears to be winding down. On a table beside the speaker sit four trophies, each made of a square wooden base topped by a glass globe. The young woman he has come to see has probably already received her award. He will have to catch a glimpse of her in the crowd as it streams toward the elevators.

The sudden announcement of her name startles the killer. It is her the speaker has been prattling on about. For a woman just nineteen years old, her list of accomplishments seems impressive. There will be no more. Not after tonight.

To warm applause, the young woman mounts the podium and stands beside the speaker. Wearing a simple, calf-length black dress, a single strand of pearls, and matching earrings, she looks elegant yet understated. As she smiles, her sparkling white teeth contrast sharply with her nearly flawless brown skin. She looks beautiful.

The man hands her one of the trophies. Then he steps aside and lets her take his place behind the microphone. She speaks for a few moments. She is gracious, thanking several people who have helped her. Then she is through. The man hugs her, a little too tightly, the killer thinks as he watches the fifty-something-year-old man press against the young woman’s firm breasts. Then she steps down and retakes her seat at a table on the right side of the room.

Seated with her are other well-dressed young people. Her place at the table faces away from the stage. Her chair is turned so she can see the awards presentations. Her back is to a young man, and she is partially facing another young woman. Were the man her date, the killer reasons, she would not have turned her back to him.

He has seen enough. Taking advantage of a round of applause for something the awards presenter said, the killer slinks from the ballroom and takes the elevator down to the lobby. He finds an overstuffed chair with a view of the elevators and sits down to wait.

The lights in the den went out at 11:00
PM
. Murphy reached into the passenger seat and wrapped his hand around a flathead screwdriver. It had a wide handle and a long, thick shank. Perfect for prying.

In case Marcy Edwards was a bedtime reader, Murphy decided to give her an hour to fall asleep.

While he waited, he closed his eyes and conjured up an image of the killer. He could see the man only in silhouette, with a featureless face obscured by shadow.

Murphy pictured himself dissolving into darkness, then seeping into the killer’s head like a dark mist, through the man’s ears, nose, eyes, and mouth. Once he was inside the killer, he envisioned the dark shadow of himself inflating like a black balloon. He pictured his own head inside the killer’s skull, looking out through the killer’s eyes, seeing what he saw, feeling what he felt, thinking what he thought.

Lee Strasberg’s acting technique, dubbed the Method, taught actors to analyze the feelings and motivations of their characters and to draw upon their own emotions and experiences to help them portray those characters with psychological and emotional authenticity. Al Pacino, James Dean, Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman, Meryl Streep, Paul Newman—all had been students of Strasberg. Using Strasberg’s method, the actor becomes the character.

Tonight, Murphy would become the Lamb of God.

He thought about his mother. All his life, but particularly since his father died, she had sought to control him. She was an overbearing, petty, insulting, selfish woman. She was the opposite of what Murphy thought a good mother should be.

Where would he be, he wondered, if she hadn’t forced him to quit Notre Dame? A lawyer? No, he hated lawyers. A doctor? Probably not. Anal probes and festering sores didn’t appeal to him. An architect or an engineer, perhaps. He excelled at math and was fascinated by puzzles and problem solving. One thing was certain, had he stayed at Notre Dame he would not have ended up a detective with the New Orleans Police Department.

And as for his sister, had Murphy been able to finish school, maybe his mother would not compare him so unfavorably to her.

Your sister is such a good mother. She dotes on that boy of hers. He takes up all of her time. That’s why she doesn’t come home very often. He’s got special needs, you know. He’s autistic.

I know that, Mother. You tell me that every time I see you. His name is Michael, by the way. And that’s not why Theresa doesn’t come home. She doesn’t come home because of you!

Murphy’s father had dropped dead of a heart attack while pouring himself a bowl of Cheerios. Growing up, Murphy and Theresa had often joked that it was their mother’s nagging that killed their father. Now, it didn’t seem like such a joke.

I hate my mother.

The banquet has run late. The young woman does not step off the elevator until eleven ten. She is with her table companions, the young woman and a young man. They cross the lobby to the revolving front door. As they disappear between the spinning panes of glass, the killer rushes after them.

Outside on the street, he spots them walking toward the river. The other two are holding hands. The three of them turn right at the next block, but by the time the killer rounds the corner they’re gone. He jogs toward the parking garage on the right. At the entrance, he peeks around the corner. He sees them. They are strolling up the ramp, chatting. The killer’s car is parked at a meter several blocks away. He doesn’t need to follow her. He knows where she is going.

As the three young people disappear around a turn in the ramp, the killer walks away.

Sunday, August 5, 12:15
AM

Murphy steps out of his car. The night is hot and still and very quiet. There is not a breath of breeze. He takes one last drag on his cigarette and drops it into the pile at his feet.