A Killer Like Me (27 page)

The following link has been sent to you by a friend. The linked video is quite shocking and should not be viewed by anyone under 18. If you are not at least 18 years old you are legally required to delete this e-mail immediately without watching the shocking video. Failure to do so constitutes a violation of international law. If you ignore this warning and view the linked video clip, you must accept full responsibility for your actions and any resulting consequences.

For your convenience at least three links appear below. If one is broken or running slowly, try another one.

Enjoy,
a friend

The message is the same for every e-mail sent out as part of the two-hundred-fifty-dollar extra service offered by the Devil’s Den. Aimed mainly at journalists and bloggers, the obvious, over-the-top wording of the message is designed to do the exact opposite of its stated intent.

The killer has seen how well it works. Within hours of the mass e-mails, his video of Sandra Jackson’s beheading was a worldwide Internet phenomenon. He is sure his second video will far surpass his first, once Kiesha’s full identity is revealed.

The killer feels his excitement building as he moves the pointer over the first of the three links that appear below the message text. As soon as he clicks the link a new browser window opens, revealing a nearly full-frame still image captured from last night’s video. The image shows the young woman bound to the chair, a pillowcase over her head. In the center of the image is a triangle pointing right and surrounded by a square, the symbol for
play
.

The killer directs the pointer over the symbol and clicks it.

A horizontal scroll bar appears at the bottom of the video as it starts to play. The killer holds down one of the function keys along the top of his computer keyboard until the volume is all the way up. He watches the two-minute video several times. The slightly blurred, green-tinted recording creates just the right atmosphere, certainly as good as he hoped, maybe even better. The climactic ending shoots a chill up his spine.

After closing the browser window, the killer checks the time stamp on the e-mail. It arrived in his in-box at 6:07
AM
.

How long, he wonders, before the television news networks pick up the story? Perhaps they already have.

He grabs the remote control from his desk and aims it at the TV on his dresser. He presses the power button and sets the television to Channel 4.

A jolt of electricity jumps through him when he reads the caption at the bottom of the picture.

“Where the fuck have you been?” Captain Donovan shouted as Murphy walked through the door of the Homicide office. “All hell has broken loose and you’ve been AWOL for eighteen fucking hours.” Donovan stood next to the secretary’s desk, clutching a stack of reports.

Murphy didn’t say anything.

“Why the fuck haven’t you answered your phone or your radio? Why the fuck do I have to send two uniforms to find my lead fucking detective?”

That was a lot of
fuck
s, Murphy thought, but it did not sound as if they had found Marcy Edwards’s body. Not yet. But they would. And they would link her death to him pretty damn quickly.

“Captain, I—”

Donovan raised a hand to stop him. “I don’t want to hear it. I got more problems than just you.” He pointed down the hall to the academy’s main classroom. “I’ve got a room full of media pukes looking for blood and answers.”

Instinct told Murphy to keep his mouth shut.

“I want you off this case more than you know,” Donovan said. “You’re useless to me. I’ve been calling you and trying to get you on the radio since the first video came out.”

“What video?” Murphy asked.

“Quit interrupting me, because that video is nothing, not now.” Donovan looked at his watch. “Not since two hours ago when the second video came out.”

“Captain, I don’t—”

“Have you even seen the second video?”

Murphy shook his head, but before he could get a word out, the captain cut him off again.

“Then get in the squad room and watch it, get current on what’s been going on, because it’s your ass that’s going out front on this. We give you a radio and a cell phone for a reason. I needed you here last night . . . but forget that. We’ll deal with that later. Right now, everybody in this city is going bat shit, and the national media is about to descend on us like a swarm of starving fucking locusts.”

Murphy didn’t get a chance to ask the captain what he was talking about, because as soon as Donovan finished speaking he turned around and stormed off.

As Murphy bumped his way through the office in a daze, it took him a minute to realize that it was a lot noisier than normal. Nearly every detective in the division was at work. When he stepped into his squad room, he saw six detectives, including new task-force members Danny Calumet and Joey Dagalotto, pressed around one desk, staring at a computer screen.

“What’s going on?” Murphy said.

Joey Doggs looked up. “Where the hell have you been?”

Murphy wasn’t about to answer to a junior detective on loan from burglary, or robbery, or vice—wherever the hell Dagalotto and Calumet had come from. “What’s going on?” he said again.

“You haven’t heard about the second video?” Doggs said.

“I haven’t heard about the first video.”

“You’re shitting me?”

“No, I’m not shitting you. What’s on it?”

“Yo, partner.” Gaudet’s voice came from behind him. “Where the hell have you been?”

Murphy turned around. The first thing he noticed was that his partner’s face was tense. The perpetual smile was gone, replaced by a nervous frown. “What’s on the damn video?” Murphy asked.

Gaudet looked over Murphy’s shoulder into the squad room. “Make a hole over there and bring him up to speed.”

Murphy walked to the desk and elbowed his way into the huddle of detectives. On the computer screen was a freeze-frame infrared shot of a woman wearing a black dress, sitting in a chair in front of a dark wall. Some type of bag or hood was over her head. Her arms and legs appeared to be bound to the chair.

“Is she tied up?” Murphy asked.

A detective named Garcia, assigned to the first watch, clicked the play button in the center of the frame. On the screen the image began to move: The woman struggles against her bonds. A man walks into the shot from the right. A dark ski mask covers his head.

“What is this?” Murphy asked Doggs.

“It’s the second video.”

The man carries a small object in his hand. As he nears the woman in the chair, the object flashes and for an instant the screen goes white.

“Was that a strobe light?” Murphy asked.

“Stun gun,” Danny Calumet said.

“Ssshhh,” said Garcia. “The dude’s about to say something.”

“Time to have some fun,” the man says.

“Here he goes,” Calumet said.

Murphy heard the cringe in the young detective’s voice.

The man jabs the stun gun against the woman’s neck and triggers it. She bucks in her seat, then collapses. Her muscles twitch.

The man steps behind the chair and looks into the camera. “You said that I am impotent, Mr. Mayor. You said that I can’t get aroused. That I am a homosexual, a sodomite. Now, I will show you who is impotent. When I get through here, you will realize that you are the impotent one, Mr. Mayor. You and your entire police department. You can’t catch me because I am beyond your reach. I am the Lamb of God.”

“Jesus Christ,” Murphy said.

The man pulls a large knife from somewhere behind his back and slices the shoulder straps of the woman’s dress. When he looks back at the camera, the infrared light catches a flash of white teeth through the mouth hole in the ski mask.

“The motherfucker is grinning,” Doggs said.

The man peels down the front of the woman’s dress. He pushes the big knife between her breasts and cuts open the front of her bra. Then he leans over and stabs the knife into the chair between her legs.

“That’s a Marine KA-BAR,” Garcia said.

The man reaches beneath the chair and comes up holding a bottle. He unscrews the cap and pours a clear liquid all over the woman’s breasts. She struggles but can’t break free.

Murphy felt his stomach twist. “He’s not going to burn her, is he?”

After the man sets the bottle down, he spends half a minute fondling the woman’s breasts. She fights so hard she almost knocks the chair over.

Not one of the detectives, all of whom were certified perverts, made so much as an admiring sound at the sight of the half-naked woman.

The man pulls the knife free from the chair and cuts through a strip of tape around the woman’s neck. He grabs the top of her hood and with a dramatic flourish rips it off her head. “Guess who?” he says. The woman’s face is a tear-stained, snot-crusted mask of terror.

Murphy leaned closer to the screen. “I don’t get it. Who is she?”

“Wait,” Garcia said.

The masked man rests his chin on the woman’s left shoulder. Her eyes are wide with fear and bright white through the green fog of the infrared light. She is hyperventilating, her breath coming in ragged gasps.

“Tell them your name, honey?” the man taunts.

She tries to catch her breath but can’t.

As if by magic, the stun gun appears above her right shoulder. “Go ahead, my little princess, tell them your name.” He triggers the stun gun, causing a flash and a brief whiteout of the screen.

When the image returns, the woman faces the camera, but her eyes are looking hard left, at the masked face of her tormentor.

“Tell them your name,” he screams.

“My name is Kiesha.”

“Kiesha what?”

“Kiesha Guidry.”

“And who’s your daddy?” the masked man asks in a taunting, singsong voice.

“He’s . . . he’s the mayor of New Orleans.”

“Holy shit,” Murphy said.

Sunday, August 5, 10:00
AM

The killer rolls a plain sheet of white paper into his twenty-five-dollar pawnshop typewriter. His gloved hands pause over the keyboard for a moment as he gathers his thoughts. Then he begins to type.

Dear times-pikayune Editor:

This is the Lamb of God. you disobeyyed me and have reaped the consequences. do not repeat your error, or i shall repeat your punishment. As of this writing the mayor’s daughter is alive, though I WILL NOT say SHE IS well. I have decided to ‘keep’ her for a time. pleese assuure THE MAYOR that i can ‘get it up.’ detektive murphhy will not ketch me. TOO BAD FOR HIM. From the press reports, i rather like him. in some respects he is like me. BE ASSURRED my work—the lord’S work, the god of blood and fire—will continue until i/we have purged this city of its harlotts, sodomittes, scoundrells, and scallywaggs. i will save this city even if i have to burn it to the grounnd. Print this letter on the front page or i will . . . well, you can guess what i’ll do.

your humble servant, log.

p.s. want to know a sekret? I killed two SODOMITES in the fq more than a year ago.

p.p.s. any luck on the cypher? ha, ha.

The killer pulls the letter from the typewriter and lays it on his desk. He folds it in thirds. From a box at his feet he removes a plain envelope and rolls it into the typewriter. His fingers pound out the Howard Avenue address of the
Times-Picayune
. Then he slips the letter into the envelope. Beneath the flap is a self-adhesive strip. He peels the covering from the strip and seals the envelope.

On a whim, the killer decides to deliver the letter in person. The post office is closed on Sundays. If he puts the letter in a mailbox today, it will not be delivered until Tuesday. That means the newspaper could not publish it until Wednesday.

Tomorrow, the story of his second video will be splashed across the front page. He wants his letter to run beside that story.

Today’s paper carries a banner headline about the killer’s first video. He has circled the newspaper’s descriptive adjectives in red:
shocking . . . outrageous . . . brutal . . . vile . . . disgusting.

The Sunday edition also contains several follow-up articles about the fire that focus on what the editors consider the heroic tales of survival and the heart-wrenching stories of the sodomites who perished.

Sickening, the killer thinks.

He enjoyed the profile in yesterday’s paper of Detective Sean Murphy, his resolute pursuer. What must he be like? the killer wonders. What motivates him? What drives him?

The killer considers his letter. Did he give away too much by mentioning the sodomites in the French Quarter last year? No, he thinks. The news will only serve to further confuse the already-confounded investigators.

All except Detective Murphy, perhaps. He seems a tad sharper than the rest, though not much. They are all quite the lot of dullards, but Murphy may merit some extra attention. The forces that drive killers may not be unlike the forces that drive those who hunt them.

Shakespeare was right. Madness in great ones must not unwatched go.

The killer walks to his closet. He dons a wide-brimmed straw hat and a Hawaiian shirt, then checks himself in the mirror above his dresser.

The newspaper offices will be less crowded today. Surely, the administrative and clerical staffs and the advertising people must have Sundays off. He expects only a skeleton crew of reporters and editors.

“You’re going in there and talk to the press,” Captain Donovan said.

Murphy was slumped in a chair in front of Donovan’s desk. His head was spinning but not from the booze. It was spinning because of the unbelievable turn of events of the last hour. He had walked into the Homicide office expecting to be arrested for murder. Now he was being told he was going to brief the press about the kidnapping of the mayor’s daughter, something he had not even known about until a few minutes ago.

“Why me?” Murphy asked.

“This fucking asshole just kidnapped the mayor’s daughter,” Donovan shouted. “And now, thanks to you, the press knows that same asshole set the fire at the gay bar.”