Now she lives in this cozy two-story cottage that her husband bought as investment property. Last year in the divorce, she wrested sole ownership of it from him, along with custody of the children and a hefty monthly child- support check.
The killer’s research is thorough.
She steps into the doorway. Her brown hair is pulled into a long ponytail. She wears a blue T-shirt, thin cotton shorts, and sneakers.
“Can I help you?” she says, her dark eyes shining. She is slightly out of breath.
With the door open he can hear the rhythmic pump of up-tempo music mixed with a female voice giving instructions. It’s an exercise video. The woman was working out.
He is dressed in a white shirt, maroon tie, and dark dress pants. His car is parked at a shopping center almost a mile away. In his left hand he carries the Book of Mormon. “My name is Joseph Smith,” he says. “I’m with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.”
She frowns and takes a step backward. “I’m not really interested, but thank you.”
He steps closer and raises the book. “I won’t take but a minute of your time, ma’am. I promise. But can I just show you one thing from the Book of Mormon?”
A look of mild annoyance crosses her face as she glances up and down the street. Don’t Mormons always travel in pairs? Perhaps she senses danger. But it’s the middle of the day. The sun is shining. She lives in a safe, quiet neighborhood, an island paradise rising above a sea of filth.
He opens the book, careful to keep the brown cover facing the woman. Inside the pages, he has carved out a rectangular space. The task was harder than he thought, at least two hours hacking away with a box cutter twenty pages at a time until he reached the back cover.
Concealed inside the empty space is a one-million-volt stun gun he bought off the Internet for a hundred dollars. The Streetwise SW1000 has a hard plastic case, is only eight inches tall, two inches wide, and one inch thick. It fits perfectly inside the space he cut out of the Book of Mormon.
Powered by three nine-volt batteries, the stun gun delivers a devastating high-volt, low-amp blast that temporarily disrupts the central nervous system and will put a grown man on the ground. According to the manufacturer, the charge can travel though several layers of clothing.
He reaches toward the book with his right hand and closes his fingers around the stun gun. They tremble slightly. He has never used this device before.
In one swift movement, the killer rips the stun gun from inside the book and shoves the twin electric prongs against the woman’s chest, high above her breasts. He presses the activation button on the side of the device with his thumb, triggering the short electric explosion. As the million-volt shock slams through the woman’s central nervous system, her eyes roll back into her head and she collapses on the tile floor.
As the killer steps into the house, he kicks the woman’s feet out of the way and closes the door. He prays none of the neighbors saw him.
She lies on her back, eyes open. They roll around in their sockets as she tries to focus on his face. She is also trying to speak, but no sound is coming from her trembling lips.
The killer drops the Book of Mormon and reaches behind his back. He pulls a plastic cable tie from the waistband of his pants and loops it around the woman’s neck. He cinches it lightly, not tight enough to kill her but enough to prevent her from screaming. Or so he hopes. Murder is an art, not a science.
In a few seconds, the shock wears off and the woman starts kicking at him. He zaps her again. The faint smell of burning flesh drifts up toward him. He grabs her ponytail and drags her into the kitchen. Other than the TV, there are no sounds inside the house. He has steeled himself to deal with the children. On his way to the woman’s house he rehearsed what he was going to say to them.
Mommy fell down. Quick, help me get her up.
When they run over to help, he will simply zap them with the stun gun. If a million volts aren’t enough to kill them, it will certainly keep them quiet. Then he will do what has to be done.
God’s work requires sacrifices, both large and small.
But he sees no children.
He bends close to the woman. “Where are your children?”
Her mouth opens. Drool spills from one corner. She tries to speak but can’t. Maybe he has cinched the cable tie too tight.
“Where are they?” he says.
“Bedrooms,” she croaks, her choked voice barely audible. “Please don’t… hurt them.”
He rolls her onto her stomach and rips down her cotton shorts. Her buttocks are white and firm. He jabs the prongs of the stun gun against her right butt cheek and thumbs the trigger. The woman convulses. Her back arches in agony. The killer smiles.
He stands and pulls a butcher knife from a wooden block on the kitchen counter…
Ten minutes later, the killer strolls across the small den to the staircase. Upstairs he finds the children’s rooms. The girl’s room is on the right, the boy’s on the left. A bathroom stands between them at the top of the stairs.
The children are down for their naps.
The girl is six. He smothers her with a pillow.
He wakes up the boy. The nine-year-old is confused. The killer says he is Mommy’s friend. The boy nods like he understands. Mommy went out for a little while and asked him to watch the boy and his sister until she returns. Do you have any games you like to play?
Yes, the boy says, video games.
He and the boy play a colorful animated racing game for nearly half an hour. Then he strangles the boy.
The phone on Kirsten Sparks’s desk rang at 2:05 PM. She was at her keyboard, banging out a follow-up article containing a few more meaningless, on-the-record comments from top NOPD officials, just like those she had included in the story that ran in today’s paper. The officials still had nothing to say about the alleged serial killer, nothing to say about Sean Murphy’s summary dismissal from the Homicide Division, nothing to say about the string of unsolved prostitute killings. They may as well have been commenting on the weather or the price of pork bellies.
The phone rang again. She snatched the handset from its cradle.
“Sparks,” she said.
“Meet me in the conference room in sixty seconds,” Milton Stanford whispered.
Kirsten glanced across the newsroom. Milton was standing beside his desk holding the phone to his ear. He was the newspaper’s managing editor, her boss, but two rungs up the ladder. Gene Michaels, the city editor, was her direct boss. Even in the rather informal world of the newsroom, most things followed the chain of command.
Milton hung up his phone and nodded to her.
Kirsten grabbed a notebook and a pen from her desk. When she looked back up, Milton had vanished. She headed to the big conference room.
No one was there. She walked down a long hallway to what everyone referred to as the little conference room. The wall separating the little conference room from the hallway was glass. The shades were down but the light was on inside. The dry-erase board on the wall outside that was used to reserve the room said, SPORTS - 10:00 AM. But that was from two days ago.
Kirsten knocked on the door.
“Come in,” a voice said.
She opened the door and found the Times-Picayune ’s brain trust seated at the conference table. In addition to Milton Stanford, who had beaten her to the conference room and already taken his seat, there was Charles Redfield, the newspaper’s executive editor, whom everyone called Red; city editor Gene Michaels; and the editor of the photo desk, Stephen Phelps. The company lawyer also had a seat at the table. And at the far end sat Mrs. Darlene Freeman, the publisher.
“Have a seat and close the door,” Milton said. “I’m sorry for all the cloak-and-dagger, but the phone in here”-he pointed to the multiline extension at the center of the table-“is busted and I had to go to my desk to call you. We’ve got something very important to talk about.”
There were eight seats around the dark wooden conference table, three on either side and one at each end.
