The cop is no Abraham, nor Lot, but maybe he can be useful.
At least he finally recognized my work.
The killer rises from the table and walks down the short hallway connecting the two rooms of his small apartment. His bedroom walls are lined with shelves, stacked with more than a hundred books, many on religion, many on… other topics of interest to him. As he brushes past them, he traces a hand over a hardcover edition of H. Montgomery Hyde’s A History of Pornography.
The killer sits down at a small writing desk wedged against the wall next to his bed. On the desk sits a Royal typewriter, circa the 1930s. On a shelf overlooking the desk stands a five-by-seven-inch frame holding a black- and-white photograph of a young woman with long dark hair and dark eyes. His mother in her early twenties, taken almost forty years ago.
The killer has decided to write a letter, but he hasn’t yet decided to whom he will send it-the police or the newspaper. After a moment’s thought, he realizes that the police may bury the letter. The newspaper will likely print it.
From a drawer beside his right knee, the killer pulls a pair of thin cotton gloves, the kind darkroom technicians once used to handle color enlarging paper, before everything went digital. He slips the gloves onto his hands, then pulls a plain sheet of twenty-pound paper from the center drawer and rolls it into the typewriter. For several seconds he holds his index fingers above the keys, mentally composing his letter, the first he has ever written about his work. Briefly, he considers the enormity of what he is about to do.
Writing to the police or to the newspaper, essentially the same thing, is fraught with danger. Look what happened to Kaczynski with his rambling manifesto. And to BTK after his taunting missives.
But I am doing the Lord’s work.
Still, he realizes that making his words public is a dangerous game.
Something tickles the back of his subconscious, something he has read. That phrase, dangerous game, where is it from? The word game certainly has more than one meaning. He bends over and picks up a dictionary from the floor beside his desk. He thumbs to the Gs. There it is. game (noun) 1. a form of play or sport, esp. a competitive one played according to rules and decided by skill, strength, or luck. His eyes glide down the text until he finds another definition. 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…
CHAPTER ELEVEN
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 protege 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
