A Killer Like Me (9 page)

3. wild mammals or birds hunted for food or sport.

That’s it. The game. The most dangerous game. He has read Robert Graysmith’s books about the Zodiac Killer, who was allegedly obsessed with Richard Connell’s short story “The Most Dangerous Game.” In that story a crazy Russian aristocrat stalks an American big-game hunter on a private island. In the title, and in the story, the word
game
has two meanings: a form of play or sport, for certainly the hunt itself is a sport; and a mammal hunted for sport . . . or food, because the American hunter is himself the prey.

What a wonderfully delicious plot twist it would have been had General Zaroff intended to hunt Sanger Rainsford down like an animal and eat him.

The killer looks at his antique typewriter, bought from a pawnshop for twenty-five dollars cash, and untraceable back to him. He tries to force his mind to focus on the task at hand. He needs his medication to keep him focused. Something dragged his mind here, to the word
game
, to the short fiction story, to the Zodiac. What was it?

The codes. That was it. Those unfathomable, indecipherable Zodiac ciphers. The Zodiac Killer included long passages of code in several of his hand-printed letters that he said contained clues to his identity. The ciphers were combinations of letters, many printed backward, and arcane symbols. Only the first one or two coded passages were ever deciphered. The rest remain unbroken to this day.

The killer knows nothing about codes. He wants to type a letter to the newspaper, not invent a cipher. But the police and the paper don’t have to know that. Thinking about the hours they will waste poring over every letter makes him laugh. He imagines the police bringing in the FBI, the CIA, the National Security Agency—all for nothing. His code will be meaningless, just babel. But it will stymie them.

He will also send them a little gift, something to establish his bona fides right away.

The killer’s hands hover again over the type keys. Carefully, he begins to peck at them.

DEAR EDITOR:

THIS IS . . .

Saturday, July 28, 8:10
AM

“If I had the authority, I’d fire you right now!” Captain Donovan said. “Unfortunately, there is a procedure that must be followed first.”

Murphy stood rigid in front of Donovan’s desk. Beside the captain, standing arrow straight like a wooden Indian, was Assistant Chief Larry DeMarco, commander of the Detective Bureau. Neither one normally worked weekends.

DeMarco had not said a word during the ten minutes Donovan had been shouting at Murphy. He didn’t need to. He just stood there in his starched uniform, the three gold stars of his rank shining on each sharply pressed epaulet.

The captain backhanded a stack of papers off his desk. “According to civil-service rules, an immediate suspension has to be
with
pay until the chief jumps through all the administrative hoops to change it to a disciplinary suspension
without
pay,” Donovan said. “You’d end up, for a while at least, getting paid to do nothing. So I’m not going to order an immediate suspension in your case, Murphy. I’m going to transfer you—with full pay—and let the chief decide how to handle your termination.”

DeMarco cleared his throat. “What the captain means, Detective, is that the chief is not going to make a decision until he gets the results of a complete PIB investigation. You will be entitled to a hearing, of course, and an appeal.”

Donovan kept his eyes fixed on Murphy but addressed the assistant chief. “He’s familiar with the process.”

“After the appeal,” DeMarco continued, “you can take the matter to district court, but the law says a district judge’s decision on civil-service matters is final. You can’t appeal the decision.”

Murphy tried to stare down DeMarco but couldn’t. The assistant chief’s eyes were like black ice and they froze Murphy, eventually forcing him to look away.

Four years ago, DeMarco had been a deputy chief, the two-star commander of PIB and the driving force behind the internal investigation that led to Murphy being fired. Before taking command of PIB, DeMarco had spent ten years as the head of the Public Affairs Division, the department’s face on the nightly news. The public knew him and trusted him.

DeMarco was a politician, not a cop, and like all politicians he was ambitious. He had his sights set on the chief’s chair. The current chief, Ralph Warren, had taken over the top spot a month after Katrina, after his predecessor had a mental breakdown and walked off the job, leaving the department and city in chaos. Warren was the mayor’s lapdog and DeMarco was the chief’s protégé and heir apparent.

Four years ago was also when, as a newly made sergeant in the Major Narcotics Unit, Murphy put the mayor’s younger brother in jail after he and Gaudet caught him driving around in a city-owned Lincoln Town Car with two nearly naked strippers in the front seat and a kilo of cocaine in the backseat.

Despite pressure from city hall, Murphy had refused to throw the case. The day after he testified at the preliminary hearing, PIB slammed him with a laundry list of “charges,” chickenshit departmental violations that included not notifying the dispatch desk that he and his partner were getting out on a vehicle stop when they pulled over the mayor’s brother, and failing to turn in trip sheets at the end of every shift.

Twenty-seven violations in all. Alone, none worth more than an ass chewing by his platoon commander or a letter of reprimand in his personnel jacket, but taken together, and pushed by the hidden hand of the mayor, they earned him a 180-day suspension, the maximum allowed under civil-service rules.

After the suspension, which had also cost Murphy his new sergeant stripes, the chief converted the suspension into a termination.

If the department had just fired him, Murphy could have hired a lawyer and begun his appeal. He also could have looked for a job. Department rules require an officer—even a suspended officer—to get official approval for any outside employment, something the department brass never gives a suspended cop. After six months of living on his savings, Murphy was broke.

Luckily, he was friends with an ex-NOPD sergeant who had gone to night school to become an attorney. The lawyer agreed to handle Murphy’s appeal and defer his fee until Murphy got back on his feet. At a Police Civil Service Board hearing six months later, Murphy’s lawyer kicked the crap out of the city attorney. The board reversed the termination order and reduced Murphy’s 180-day suspension to ninety days and ordered the city to give him three months’ back pay.

In a bureaucratic oversight, the board’s decision didn’t address the issue of Murphy’s demotion from sergeant back to patrolman, so the department got to keep his stripes. When the check for the back pay finally came, the ex-cop turned lawyer took half of it.

Murphy had his job back, though.

A year later, he got into a shootout with a pair of cranked-up bank robbers who had just murdered a security guard. Murphy killed one bandit and wounded the other. He managed to parlay the shootout into a transfer back to Homicide.

Then came Katrina and nothing had been right since.

“I just want to know one thing, Murphy,” Donovan said. “What the fuck were you thinking? What did you think was going to happen after the mayor and the chief read the paper this morning? Did you think they were going to give you a task force?”

Murphy didn’t answer. There was nothing so say.

“No, I really want to know,” Donovan continued. “I mean, it’s the clearest violation of section seventy-four point eight of the department’s manual of orders I’ve ever seen, and I’m just curious what you thought was going to happen.”

A miserable silence hung in the air. Donovan and DeMarco stared at Murphy.

“I don’t know, Captain,” Murphy said. “It was a mistake, I know that, but I thought the public had a right to know what was going on. I also figured some press coverage might generate tips from—”

“Who gave you the authority to make decisions for this department, Murphy?” the homicide commander shouted. “Who the fuck put you in charge?”

The assistant chief looked at his watch. “Captain,” he said, “we’ve got a press conference to go to. Let’s wrap this up.”

Donovan hoisted himself to his feet. “Officer Murphy, as of this moment you are assigned to Central Evidence and Property. Beginning tonight and until further notice, you will report to the property room each day, in uniform, for your regular shift, ten twenty-five p.m. to seven a.m. Before you leave here this morning, you will clean out your desk and turn in all of your case files, all your notes, your office keys, your radio, your vest, and your car.”

Donovan leaned across his desk. “Then you will get out of my division and wait for the order to come down to terminate your ass.”

The assistant chief coughed into his hand.

Donovan stabbed a finger toward the door. “Now get the fuck out of my office!”

Murphy turned around and walked out.

The most humiliating part of Murphy’s summary dismissal from the Homicide Division was the final walk through the squad room. It was like a cliché from a bad cop movie that Murphy was watching instead of living, a sort of out-of-body experience.

He emptied his few personal possessions from the desk he shared with a detective on the opposite shift, a man Murphy saw for five minutes two or three times a week. The only thing he knew about his counterpart was that he was married to a pretty brunette, a nurse, judging by the scrubs she wore in a photo on the desk. The picture was of the two of them together at a bar. They were both smiling. They had two children, a boy and a girl, information Murphy gleaned from the second photograph in the two-picture drugstore frame.

Murphy had often looked with a certain degree of envy at the photographs and wondered what his counterpart’s life was like behind the picture-perfect images. Were the detective and his wife as happy as they looked, or were their smiles just the same masks that everyone else wore? Did they fight a lot? Was she fucking a doctor while her husband worked nights? Did he have a shack job?

In the second photo, the boy looked about twelve, his sister a couple of years younger. Were they as happy and well-adjusted as they seemed, or had the two years that had elapsed since the picture appeared on the desk changed them? Had the boy turned into a dope-smoking hippy and the girl a prepubescent slut?

Sometimes in his darker moments, Murphy hoped so. Then he felt bad about thinking that, so he said the Lord’s Prayer in his head to clear his conscience. Just like his mother used to tell him to do when he was a teenager and she caught him staring at a girl.

Murphy dumped everything he owned into a discarded copypaper box he found next to the trash can. But the box was too big. His belongings could have fit into a shoe box.

The stapler was his, as was a box of government Skilcraft pens he’d bummed from his buddy at ATF. He had a paperback copy of Michael Connelly’s
The Black Echo
, a day planner to keep track of court dates, a stack of new notebooks held together with a pair of rubber bands, a tape dispenser, a set of crime-scene sketch templates, and a copy of
Practical Homicide Investigation
.

That was it.

No pictures, no Valentine’s Day cards, no kids’ drawings of Daddy in his police uniform.

Murphy tossed his car keys on the desk, picked up his cardboard box, and started for the door. On his way out he pinched a blank leave slip from the secretary’s desk.

During that final, clichéd walk, the squad room turned eerily silent. Just to break the tension, one detective said, “See you around, Murph.”

Another asked if he needed a ride.

Murphy nodded. “Yeah, actually I do.”

As he shuffled through the parking lot, Murphy saw his department-issued Taurus and remembered he had some personal items locked inside it, but the keys were back on his desk. He decided to collect his belongings later.

The ride home was painful. The other detective did the obligatory motherfucking of the rank, but Murphy got the feeling the guy was doing it just to fill the silence that would otherwise have engulfed the car. Mercifully, traffic was light going uptown. Murphy told the detective to drop him off at a corner grocery store a block from his apartment. Murphy knew the owner, an old Sicilian named Vincent Dispenza. In the back office, Vincent had a fax machine he had let Murphy use before.

At the corner, Murphy climbed out of the detective’s car and stood on the street clutching his pathetic cardboard box. “Thanks for the ride.”

“Sure, Murph,” the detective said as he drummed the steering wheel. “You’ll get back up there one day.” Then he drove off, practically spinning the tires in his desire to get away. Murphy understood. He was a pariah, a disease carrier next to whom no one wanted to stand for fear of catching his contagion.

Murphy turned toward Vincent’s. The grocery store was old New Orleans, a corner store actually built on the corner, with the double doors facing the apex of the sidewalk.

There were a hundred stores like Vincent’s, maybe more, spread across the city. In the old days Sicilians owned them all. These days you were more likely to find a Palestinian or a Jordanian minding the store, sometimes a Korean or Vietnamese. National chain grocery stores were still the exception in New Orleans. Most people bought—or as die-hard New Orleanians said, “made”—their groceries on the corner. Some things were better off left alone.

Vincent was manning the register. His wife, Mary, was churning out sandwiches behind the deli counter.

“Good-a morning, Sean,” Vincent said, his Sicilian accent still thick even after forty years in the United States. “What-a is that you are-a carrying?”

“Nothing. Just my life’s worth.”

“What-a you say?”

Murphy shook his head as he set the box on the counter. “Can I use your fax machine? I need to send something to the police department.”

Vincent nodded toward the back of the store. “You know-a where it is,” he said as a thirty-something-year-old black woman with two kids in tow set a box of cereal, a pack of cinnamon rolls, and a half gallon of ice cream down on the checkout counter next to Murphy’s cardboard box.