A Killer Like Me (41 page)

At the edge of the open door, he paused and took a deep breath. This was it, he thought. Only one of us will leave this room alive.

Murphy pushed off with his good leg and stepped into the room. Jeffries was to his right, his back to the door. He stood next to Kiesha Guidry, who was still bound to the chair. Jeffries held a sheet of yellow paper in front of Kiesha with his left hand. His right hand held a huge knife, nearly the size of a machete. He pressed the tip of the blade against the terrified girl’s neck.

Kiesha sat facing the camera across the room. She was reading out loud from the paper Jeffries held in front of her, but Murphy couldn’t make out the words over the sound of the wind blowing through the shattered French doors. Jeffries was looking down at her.

For a moment, neither of them noticed Murphy.

He could not fire his last round of buckshot without hitting Kiesha.

Then Jeffries turned and saw him. He dropped the sheet of paper and the knife and snatched the Glock from his waistband. Murphy tried to jump behind the wall but his right leg folded under him. He fell on his back in the doorway.

Jeffries screamed something, but the wind sucked his words out of the room before they reached Murphy’s ears.

With the pistol thrust out in one hand, Jeffries took two steps toward Murphy and fired. The bullet smacked into the doorframe beside Murphy’s right ear. Jeffries took a third step and paused to take careful aim. He didn’t seem to notice that the slide on the Glock had locked back on an empty magazine.

Murphy noticed.

When Jeffries pulled the trigger, nothing happened. So he pulled it again. Then he turned the pistol in his hand and stared into the empty chamber.

Murphy raised the shotgun and fired.

The blast caught Jeffries high in the chest. He stayed on his feet for several seconds, looking down at the dozen black holes smoking in his chest. Then he collapsed.

Murphy pulled himself up from the floor. There was no need to check Jeffries for a pulse. No one survives a round of buckshot to the chest from six feet.

Murphy dropped the shotgun and looked at Kiesha Guidry. “Are you hurt?”

She stared at Jeffries. “Is he dead?”

“He’s dead.” Murphy hobbled toward her and reached for his folding knife, but it wasn’t there. He lowered himself onto his left knee and tore at the duct tape with his fingers.

A blast of wind ripped through the broken French doors and shook the house like a dog with a bone. From another upstairs room came the sound of breaking glass. Then from outside, Murphy heard what sounded like a piece of tin bouncing down the street.

Catherine was here.

“We need to get downstairs,” Murphy said. “We’re going to have to ride out the storm here.”

She looked at him and nodded.

“You are Kiesha Guidry, right?”

She nodded again.

“We’ve been looking for you.”

She started crying.

After Murphy tore the last piece of duct tape that bound Kiesha to the chair, he tried to pull her to her feet, but she couldn’t stand. So he bent down and hefted her onto his right shoulder and swung her into a fireman’s carry. His knee almost gave out after the first step, but he managed to make it all the way to the top of the stairs before he had to set her down.

Outside, the wind was a continuous roar, like a speeding train. The hammerlike gusts shook the house to its foundation. Murphy was worried the old house couldn’t stand up to the beating it was about to get.

After a minute’s rest for his throbbing knee, Murphy bent over to pick up Kiesha again, but she laid a hand on his shoulder to stop him. “You’re hurt,” she said. “I can make it.”

She ended up helping him down the stairs.

They took shelter in the bathroom. Three of the four walls were interior walls and there were no windows. They lay down together in the bathtub and Murphy covered them with his raincoat. He wrapped his arms around her.

“What if it floods?” she asked.

“It won’t,” Murphy said. “The levees have been redesigned. They’ll hold this time.”

The storm raged for hours. Early on, a transformer exploded and the streetlights went dark. All around them, Murphy heard trees and light poles snapping and crashing to the ground. Despite the tremendous noise, Kiesha fell asleep. She woke up once when something big smashed into the side of the house, but when Murphy told her it was nothing to worry about she fell back asleep.

Sometime after midnight, the storm started to slacken. The eye was getting close, Murphy thought. After the eye passed, the wind strengthened again.

Part of the roof blew off around 2:00
AM
. The sound of the wood being ripped apart jolted Murphy. He expected the walls to fall down on top of them any minute. But the house held. By three o’clock, the worst of the storm was over.

Dawn came late. He woke Kiesha and they walked outside and stood on the sidewalk. The rain had slowed to a drizzle. The wooden awning that had broken his fall and saved his life had blown away. There was no sign of flooding. The levees had held.

“I told you,” he said.

She was bundled in his raincoat and looked up at him. She smiled for the first time. “You didn’t know. You just said that to make me feel better.”

Murphy smiled back. “Did it work?”

She nodded. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

Thursday, August 9, 6:30
PM

Catherine wreaked tremendous havoc across the city, swatting down power lines, uprooting trees, damaging and destroying homes and businesses, but because she did not leave a biblical flood in her wake like Katrina, the cleanup and rebuilding began almost immediately.

By Wednesday afternoon, less then forty-eight hours after the storm, the power was starting to come back on. By Thursday night, half the city had lights, including the Star & Crescent on Tulane Avenue, where Murphy found a seat at the bar.

He had spent all day Wednesday and Thursday locked in an interview room at PIB, grilled by Lieutenant Carl Landry about the deaths of Detective Juan Gaudet and serial killer Richard Lee Jeffries. In all that time, Landry only once acknowledged, and even then reluctantly, that Murphy had saved Kiesha Guidry’s life.

At six o’clock Thursday night, Murphy had walked out of the PIB office without handcuffs on. He considered that a victory. He drove straight to the Star & Crescent.

The video had helped. Homicide had recovered Jeffries’s camera. The last segment of the video showed Murphy, battered and bleeding, ripping the bonds off Kiesha Guidry’s wrists and ankles, slinging her over his shoulder, and then limping away as he carried her to safety.

Murphy was on his first beer when a familiar voice spoke behind him.

“I heard the lights were back on, so I figured you’d be here,” Kirsten Sparks said.

Murphy looked over his shoulder. “Pull up a chair. I think I might owe you a beer.”

“You owe me more than that, hero, but I’ll take a beer as a down payment.”

Murphy signaled to the off-duty cop behind the bar.

“You see the front page today?” Kirsten asked.

He nodded. “Landry showed it to me.”

“Is that where you’ve been?”

Murphy took a long sip of his beer. “For two days.”

“The AP picked up the story. CNN and Fox have both called. Bill O’Reilly wants me on his show. I’m surprised he hasn’t called you.”

“I lost my phone.”

“There’s definitely a book deal in it for you, probably a movie too. ‘Hero cop saves mayor’s daughter’
.
”

“I doubt I’ll get a thank-you card from the mayor,” Murphy said.

Kirsten leaned closer and whispered. “Gaudet’s calendar was a gold mine. Wait until you see tomorrow’s front page. I wouldn’t be surprised if the feds indict Guidry next week.”

“I’m going to have to testify before the grand jury. Tell them about the calendar. About what Juan told me before . . . he died.”

Kirsten laid a hand on Murphy’s shoulder. “I’m sorry to sound so gleeful about the story. I know this has to be really hard on you.”

“Juan was a big boy. He made his own decisions.”

They sat in silence for a few minutes, sipping their beers, both lost in their own thoughts.

Kirsten broke the silence. “Something I’ve been wanting to ask you.”

“Yeah?”

“How did you find out about the house on Burgundy?”

That was the same question Lieutenant Landry had asked him at least fifteen times. Murphy told the PIB man that he was driving back to the office for the search-warrant briefing when he got an anonymous call. His cell-phone number, along with the Crime Stoppers tip line, had been at the bottom of one of the articles about the serial killer.

Murphy claimed the caller told him about the house on Burgundy. He said he drove by the house to check it out. He tried to call in on the radio, but he couldn’t get through.

Like Katrina, Catherine had knocked out NOPD’s radio system. Of course, that hadn’t happened until hours after Murphy claimed he tried to call in, but that was splitting hairs. Who could say, except Murphy himself, whether his radio was working that evening or not?

“What number did the source call from?” Landry had asked.

“It was blocked,” Murphy said.

“Why didn’t you call Captain Donovan on your cell phone?”

“I tried to, but nobody answered. I guess they were busy briefing for the search warrant.”

“Where’s your phone?” Landry had asked.

“I lost it during the storm.”

It wasn’t a great story. Murphy knew that. But it was the best one he could come up with on short notice. Landry could subpoena his cell-phone records, but given everything that had happened, that might be a can of worms even PIB didn’t want to open.

“Murphy,” Kirsten said.

“Huh?”

“How did you find out about the house on Burgundy?”

“I got an anonymous tip,” he said.

Kirsten finished her beer.

Murphy watched her gulp down the last couple of swallows. He found it sexy as hell. “You remember our first date?” he said.

She set the empty beer bottle on the bar. “You took me to DiGiulio’s on Saint Charles.”

“All you drank was a glass of wine.”

“So?”

“So on our second date, you drank whiskey.”

She shook her head. “I know what you’re getting at, and that wasn’t our second date. It was our fourth. Plus we had gone out to lunch a couple of times in between.”

“So did you invite me to stay over that night because you liked me, or because you had been drinking whiskey?”

She smiled. “A little of both.”

He smiled back at her as he waved at the bartender, who was camped at the far end of the bar watching the TV news. Murphy saw his picture on the screen. The story of him gunning down the serial killer and rescuing the mayor’s daughter had been on every news broadcast for three straight days.

Murphy nodded toward Kirsten’s empty beer bottle. “You want another one?”

She turned toward him, a slightly seductive glint in her eyes. “I like beer,” she said. “Whiskey’s better.”

Murphy sits alone in his car. Beyond the glowing dashboard clock, the street is dark. It’s late.

In the three weeks since the storm, he and Kirsten have been seeing each other again. After his marathon interrogation, PIB has left him alone. He even managed to stay in the Homicide Division.

Mayor Ray Guidry is going down for the count. The feds have impaneled a special grand jury to investigate allegations that he demanded huge kickbacks from Katrina contractors. According to the
Times-Picayune
, several of the contractors have agreed to testify against him.

Murphy has almost stopped thinking about Marcy Edwards.

Things are going well. Except that for the last several days he has felt a certain . . . restlessness. A sort of jumpiness creeping into his body that demands action.

Staring through the bug-splattered windshield of his unmarked police car, Murphy sees an aging BMW sedan turn the next corner. As the car’s headlights shine in Murphy’s direction, he sinks lower in his seat. The car glides to a stop at the curb in front of a dark house in the middle of the block. Murphy glances at the clock. It’s 10:25. She worked even later than usual.

A tall woman with long dark hair climbs out of the driver’s seat. She slings her purse over one shoulder and drags a thick leather briefcase out behind her. She bumps the car door shut with her hip and treks up the walkway toward her front door.

Murphy watches as the lights come on inside the house.

CHUCK HUSTMYRE is a retired federal agent and an award-winning journalist. He is the author of the Dorchester novel
A Killer Like Me
and the nonfiction books
Killer with a Badge
and
Unspeakable Violence
. He also wrote the script for the movie
House of the Rising Sun
.

For more information visit www.chuckhustmyre.com.