handful of her hair and wrenches her head away. He feels a chunk of flesh tear loose from his cheek. The pain nearly paralyzes him. Somehow, he manages to roll to his right. He scrambles on top of her, then straddles her. But her hands are still locked on to his throat. The light is fading. His world is going dim.
He sweeps an arm across his body and knocks her hands away. Air pours into his starving lungs. It tastes sweet, like victory. He drives his forearm into her throat and presses his weight behind it. She tries to dig her fingers into his eyes, but he clinches them shut.
Rolling forward with his forearm still pressed against her windpipe, the killer slams his other elbow down onto her face. Her eyes bulge from their sockets. Her arms sag. With the tenacity of a cage fighter, he pounds her head with his elbow again and again until she goes limp. Then, like a spent lover, he takes a deep breath and collapses on top of her.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Sunday, August 5, 11:05 PM
It was raining hard when Murphy finally made it home. According to a radio report he had heard in the car, the storm was moving much faster than any of the computer models had predicted. One news commentator said the mayor had waited too long to pull the trigger on the city’s first evacuation since Katrina.
As soon as Murphy unlocked his apartment door, his cell phone rang. It was Mother.
“Where have you been?” she screeched in his ear, sounding drunker than usual. “They’re evacuating the city. When were you going to tell me?”
He pushed the door open with his foot and stepped over an envelope lying on the floor just inside the threshold. He stared down at it, only half listening as his mother continued her rant.
When she paused for breath, he said, “Everything is all set, Mother. I called the manager, Mr. Dugas, today. He has three buses lined up to take everybody to Baton Rouge.”
“I don’t want to ride on a bus full of old people,” she said.
The envelope on the floor had Murphy’s name typed on the front. Just his name, not his address.
“It’s only eighty miles, Mother.”
“I don’t care if it’s eight miles or eight hundred miles. I have a son. I shouldn’t have to take a bus to Baton Rouge.”
Murphy set his briefcase down and picked up the envelope. It was thin, just a single sheet of folded paper inside. His name had not been printed from a computer. It had been typed with a typewriter.
“… are you listening to me?”
He hadn’t been. “Mother, I’m a detective. I’m trying to catch a serial killer and find the mayor’s kidnapped daughter. I don’t have time to drive you to Baton Rouge.” He flipped his phone closed and walked into the kitchen.
Glancing across the bar into the den, he saw the empty Knob Creek bottle on the coffee table, and the sofa on which he had sat just twenty hours ago, alternately throwing back gulps of whiskey and jamming the muzzle of his pistol in his mouth.
His phone rang. Mother again. He flipped the phone open and jammed his finger on the ignore button. He laid the envelope on the counter and stared at it.
What could it be? Shoved under his door like that, with no address on it. An eviction notice? A rent increase? No. It smelled more sinister than that.
And from whom?
His landlord? One of his neighbors? Had he made too much noise this morning during his drunken, suicidal binge? Did he rattle the walls with his Warren Zevon songs?
Murphy knew what the envelope contained and who it was from.
He picked it up by its edges. From his right front pocket he pulled his folding knife. He thumbed the blade open and sliced through the envelope’s flap. Using the tips of his fingers, he slipped the typed letter out. He unfolded it and used the envelope to press the page flat on the kitchen counter. My Dear Detektive Murphhy: This is the Lamb of God speaking. first let me say that i am an admirer of yourrs. you are a worthy opponennt and the only one who recognizzed my work, though you have only scratched the surface. regarding wingate, you and i know that i did not kill marccy edwardds. you have SCRUPULOUSLY kept my signature-log-hidden from the public. imagine my surprise today (sunday) when I heard i had left my “telltale signature” at this most recent “crime scene.” I don’t know what “game” you are playing, but did you really think you could “pin” that on me? shame, shame, detektive. i admirre your ENTHUSIASM but your work is sloppy. how did it feel, by the way, to take her life, to watch it drain from her eyes? your faithful servant, log p.s. i hope you were careful-no fingerprinTts, no fiberrs, no dnna! p.p.s. we really should get togethher. i sense a kindred spirrit. you are a killer like me.
Murphy read the letter a second time, his eyes lingering over the postscripts.
He knows it was me.
That didn’t make sense. How could he possibly know?
Murphy’s head was spinning. He opened the refrigerator and found an Amstel Light hidden in the back, behind a curdled half gallon of milk. Fumbling through the utensil drawer, he found a bottle opener and pried off the top. After a long sip, he read the letter a third time.
Misspellings notwithstanding, what did the letter mean? Why had the killer not mentioned the mayor’s daughter, currently the highest-profile crime in the country? Just Wingate. And what did he mean when he said that Murphy had only scratched the surface? Were there more bodies, earlier victims? Murphy had always suspected there were.
The letter was addressed to him and hand-delivered to his apartment. Clearly it was a warning, but to what end? Did he really think that scaring off one detective would stop the investigation, stop the search for Kiesha Guidry?
Standing at the kitchen counter, Murphy gulped down the rest of his beer. He thought about those cigarettes, packed with DNA from his saliva. He thought about the letter’s last two lines: “I sense a kindred spirit. You are a killer like me.”
What the hell did that mean?
We’re nothing alike. The Lamb of God is a murderous psycho. I’m a homicide detective. My job is to catch killers… except when I strangle a woman and try to frame someone else for my own crime. But I didn’t mean to kill her. I was trying to catch a murderer, not become one.
The killer might suspect, but he couldn’t know. He couldn’t.
But what happens if when he is caught the killer decides to talk? When Gillis was arrested in Baton Rouge he spilled his guts about the women he had murdered. But he was also adamant about the ones he did not kill. Those cases stayed open.
What could the Lamb of God say? That he strangled more than half a dozen women, beheaded one, kidnapped the mayor’s daughter, and burned more than seventy people to death. But he didn’t kill Marcy Edwards? Detective Murphy killed her.
Who did he think was going to believe him, especially with his initials scrawled in Marcy Edwards’s blood?
PIB would believe him.
At least enough to check out his story. Quietly of course, but thoroughly.
The cheese eaters would not have to look far to find enough inconsistencies between the Edwards case and the others to fuel their suspicions. Marcy Edwards’s killer had used his hands to strangle her, not a cable tie. The letters were drawn on the floor, not carved into her flesh. And what about the time line? Would the Lamb of God Killer have had time to murder Marcy Edwards and kidnap the mayor’s daughter on the same night? Or was it more likely that the discrepancies between the two cases meant the Edwards murder was a copycat crime?
And what about the DNA on the cigarettes outside Marcy Edwards’s house, waiting like nails to be driven into Murphy’s coffin? Maybe an oral swab during the autopsy had picked up even more of his DNA left behind during his failed attempt to resuscitate her.
PIB would ask for a DNA sample to exclude Murphy as a suspect. Murphy could refuse, but that would focus
