overpass is cut off from the rest of the world. The only danger is from passing police cars leaving the jail complex.
The harlot unbuckles her seat belt and leans toward him. She rubs his crotch with one hand as she pulls his belt loose with the other. She unsnaps his pants. “Momma’s gonna give you some honey right now, sugar.”
He slips his right arm between the front seats and curls his fingers around a hard plastic cable tie lying on the floorboard behind the passenger seat. Then he hooks his left hand through the door latch as he lifts the heavy-duty cable tie over the seat until it hovers just above the woman’s head.
She tugs at his zipper, then reaches inside his pants and rubs his limp, unexcited flesh. “Sugar, I’m going to have to give you some help, but don’t you worry, Momma’s gonna take good care-”
Moving quickly, his right hand drops the looped twenty-four-inch tie over the harlot’s head while his left hand yanks the door latch. He shoves the door open with his knee and grabs the bun at the back of the woman’s head with his left hand. Then he pulls her face into his lap and yanks up on the cable tie. The plastic ratchet makes a zipping sound as its ridged tongue rips through the locking mechanism.
As soon as the tie is cinched around the woman’s throat, he slides out of the car and stands beside the driver’s seat. He reaches back inside and pushes her facedown into the cracked vinyl upholstery.
With her airway choked off, the woman can’t scream. But for a full minute, she flails her arms and claws at him. Just before she passes out she leaves a long scratch on his right forearm.
Scanning the area under the overpass, he sees only the darkness and hears only the quiet. No one has noticed him. Grabbing the harlot by the wrists, he drags her from the car and dumps her facedown on the asphalt.
As he waits for the last remnants of the woman’s life to drain from her, he thinks about how he had been drawn to her from the first moment he saw her more than a week ago. Since then, he has known she was going to be a part of his next cleansing, despite the added danger of her working so close to the courthouse and the jail.
Sadly, he won’t have the chance to explain to her why he is doing this. Finding an abandoned bar near where the last harlot worked had been fortunate. God had given him the opportunity to explain to her why she was being sacrificed and how her soul was being cleansed. He couldn’t expect to have that opportunity every time.
After a few minutes, when he is certain she has passed from this life, he rolls the woman over. Her eyes are already glassy, their edges lined with burst blood vessels. He unbuttons and removes her imitation-silk blouse, then pulls off her high-heeled sandals and peels away her skirt. She wears no bra or panties. This woman was a true harlot. Soon she will be clean again.
He spreads her arms and legs wide and then looks around for something to use for the rest of the ritual. She will get no physical contact from him because he has no interest in her whore’s flesh. But he will treat her like the whore she is. This one won’t feel it like the last one did, but her soul will know the Lord’s hand has reached out and touched her vile places.
She is his tenth sacrifice, and still no one has recognized his work. No one even knows he is here at all. But he has a plan. If this dead harlot doesn’t capture the attention of the police and the press, he knows what will. He has something more dramatic in mind, something much more dramatic.
CHAPTER FOUR
Wednesday, July 25, 8:00 AM
“This motherfucker must be crazy!” Detective Juan Gaudet said. “He kills this poor girl and dumps her body half a motherfucking mile from police headquarters.”
They were looking down at the naked corpse of another woman, this one under the South Jeff Davis overpass.
“Headquarters is just another empty building now,” Murphy said.
Gaudet took a deep breath. “Still…”
Murphy glanced at his partner. “Who are you talking about, anyway?”
“Don’t play with me, goddamnit. You know exactly who the fuck I’m talking about.
So you’re back with me on this?
I never left you on it. It just ain’t worth getting transferred to the Seventh District night watch over.
You agree this is the same guy?”
Gaudet squatted close to the dead woman’s midsection. His face tightened. “Look what he did to her, man.”
She lay on her back spread-eagled, with a rusty piece of steel rebar protruding a foot from her vagina. Her hands were missing.
“There’s not much blood,” Murphy said. “There’s a good chance she was dead when he did this.”
Gaudet stood. “This motherfucker is sick, you hear me, sick.
He’s a serial killer who mutilates women. He’s a fucking psycho.”
An hour ago a patrolman leaving lockup had spotted the body. The crime scene was a small patch of urban wasteland, in the middle of the city but out of sight from just about everywhere.
“Why take her hands?” Gaudet said.
Murphy shrugged. “Maybe he thinks that without fingerprints we won’t be able to identify her. Or maybe he took them for souvenirs.”
“What about the cable tie?” Gaudet said.
“What about it?”
“Why did he leave it this time but not last time?”
The woman’s eyes were bulged and bloodshot. Her tongue was black and swollen and hanging from her mouth.
“Maybe she died before he could remove it,” Murphy said. “Maybe he forgot his pocket knife.”
Gaudet stomped his feet in frustration. “Two victims in two days. I’m telling you, this motherfucker is crazy.” He bent over and tapped his pen against the hard plastic cable tie. “Where do you get these things?”
“Wal-Mart, Home Depot. They come in all sizes. He probably picked up a pack at a hardware store.”
“And once he puts it on there’s no way to get it off.”
Murphy shook his head. “You have to cut it.”
“They probably realize that,” Gaudet said. “His victims, I mean. They probably know there’s no way to get that thing off, that they’re going to die.”
“Probably.”
“How long you figure it takes?”
Murphy stared at the dead woman’s face. “About a minute before she blacks out. Three or four until she’s dead.”
The woman was young, early twenties, Murphy guessed. Other than some dental issues, probably from smoking crack, she wasn’t bad looking. Just the one tattoo, “Johnny’s Girl,” in script across the front of her thigh. If she could have gotten off the pipe, she might have had a chance at a decent life.
Murphy stepped away and started walking the crime scene.
A few minutes later, he found a black skirt and a pair of “fuck me” pumps lying against one of the concrete pylons, ten yards from the body.
A three-foot length of rusted steel rod lay just a few feet from the skirt and sandals. If the piece of rebar the killer had used on the victim was the same length as the one near the pylon, it meant he had shoved two feet of steel inside the woman. If she had been alive when he did it, she would have bled a lot more. Thank God for small favors.
Behind him, Gaudet said, “What are you going to do?”
“Give the rank one more chance to come clean about what’s going on.
And if they don’t?
If these girls knew there was a killer out here hunting them like animals, they’d be more careful. They wouldn’t get into cars with customers they don’t know. They could work in pairs, watch each other’s backs.”
