“Or they could quit hooking,” Gaudet said.
“How likely is that?”
“And if the rank still won’t own up to the truth?”
“I’m going to do what I said.”
“Will she talk to you?”
Murphy nodded toward the body. “If it’s about a serial killer, yeah.
Hell hath no fury, my brother.”
How did the killer get her there?
It was a question Sean Murphy had been wrestling with since he first got to the South Jeff Davis crime scene.
He had shown a photo of the victim’s face to a couple of vice detectives. They knew her by sight but couldn’t remember her name. One of the vice cops remembered seeing her a couple of times working on Tulane near the courthouse.
There’s no way, Murphy thought, she would have walked the eight blocks from criminal district court to the Jeff Davis overpass with a john, not when the storm had left plenty of abandoned houses and empty buildings in between where she could knock out a two-minute blow job or a quick bend-over.
The logical answer was a car. Whether she’d gone voluntarily or involuntarily, the killer had driven her to the overpass.
Inside the Homicide office, sitting behind his shared desk-there were ten desks for sixteen detectives-Murphy typed out an intradepartmental memo, a Form 105, requesting that every platoon and shift commander in the city ask at roll call if any officer had seen anything suspicious or had taken note of any cars parked near Central Lockup, the still-abandoned police headquarters building, or the courthouse last night.
Since all interdepartmental memos had to go through the chain of command, Murphy figured his 105 would take a week to get into the hands of the people who would actually read it aloud at roll calls. Just enough time for anyone who saw anything suspicious to forget the details.
After dropping his memo in the captain’s in-box, Murphy drove to the ruined police headquarters building on Broad Street next to the courthouse. It was 1:00 PM. Gaudet had gone to court at ten o’clock that morning and said he expected to be there all day, waiting to testify in an old homicide case. Murphy decided to canvass the fourteen-square-block area between the courthouse and the crime scene, looking for surveillance cameras.
A thorough canvass had to be done on foot. It was too easy to miss something in a car. The area was bordered by Tulane Avenue, Broad Street, Perdido Street, and South Jeff Davis Parkway. It was a run-down, half- abandoned, trapezoid-shaped section of Mid-City, bisected down its long axis by Gravier Street. Small shotgun houses lined the interior thruways.
Katrina had dumped four feet of water onto the neighborhood and run everyone off. A lot of people hadn’t come back. In addition to police headquarters, the district attorney’s office, across the street from criminal district court, still stood empty. The DA had taken his people to a building on Poydras Street, not far from the Superdome. There were cameras outside the old DA’s building, but they hadn’t worked since the storm.
Three small businesses-a corner store, a hair salon, and a tire shop-provided the only commerce in the neighborhood, and by the look of things, all three were on life support. Only the tire shop had a security camera. Speedy’s Tires stood on the corner of South Rendon and Gravier, in the block adjacent to where the woman’s body had been found.
“I only got two tapes,” the owner told Murphy. “I rotate them so they last longer.”
The two men stood just inside the work bay.
“Which tape did you have in last night?” Murphy asked.
“It’s still in the machine,” the man said. He was tall, six three, about fifty years old, with big, powerful shoulders. He looked prison hard.
Murphy glanced at the heat waves rising off the street. A breeze would be nice, he thought. “Can I take a look at it?” Murphy said. His feet hurt. He was sweating bullets. It was too damn hot to be pounding the pavement in a suit and tie.
“Sure,” the big man said. Then he turned around and walked toward his office at the back of the shop.
Murphy fell in behind him.
The office was small and cluttered. A pile of tire catalogs, stacks of receipt books, a gray metal desk, a file cabinet, a bookcase-all jammed into an eight-foot-by-eight-foot square. An old videotape recorder and a thirteen- inch black-and-white television sat on a shelf over the desk.
“I got broke into a little over a year ago,” the tire man said. “Little bastards just kicked open the front door and came right on in.”
“What’d they get?” Murphy asked.
“Tires and rims, and my cash box. I don’t keep cash around here no more, and I put a security camera on the corner of the building to watch the front door.” The shop owner punched a button on the video recorder and grabbed the VHS tape when it popped out.
“How long does a tape last?”
“About twelve hours. The camera only takes a picture every few seconds. They call it time… time something. Time delay, I think.”
“Time-lapse,” Murphy said.
A label stuck on the edge of the tape had the words Speedy’s Tire-Tape One handwritten across it.
“Are you Speedy?” Murphy asked.
The man nodded. “My daddy gave me that name.”
Speedy held the tape out to Murphy. “You can take it with you. Just bring it back when you’re finished.”
Murphy nodded. “I don’t even think we have a VCR at the office that works. You mind if I watch a little of it here?”
“Be my guest,” Speedy said. He shoved the tape back into the machine and mashed a flattened thumb against the power button on the TV. Then he hit the rewind button on the VCR.
“I’m sorry about the time,” Speedy said as soon as the tape started playing.
At the bottom of the TV screen the date and time flashed “01-01-01/12:00 AM.”
“The power keeps going out and I can’t ever remember how to reset it.”
“It’s not a problem,” Murphy said. “What time did you start recording last night?”
“About six o’clock.”
According to the coroner’s best guess, the woman had probably been killed between 9:00 PM and 1:00 AM. That meant Murphy didn’t need to watch the first three hours or the last five. Just that four-hour stretch in the middle. He had a VCR at home that would show the elapsed time, as long as he started the tape at the beginning and reset the counter.
But what if the killer had cruised the neighborhood earlier in the evening to get a feel for it? Or drove around afterward to stay close to the victim? Murphy realized he was going to have to watch the whole tape. He punched the eject button. “I better take it home. This is going to take a while.”
“I’m sorry about that, Detective. You go on and keep that tape as long as you want. I’ll use the other one until you get done.”
Even on fast-forward, watching the entire tape was going to take at least three hours.
Great, Murphy thought. Just great.
At the recently refurbished criminal district court building, the images from the surveillance cameras fed into a digital recorder. Unlike Speedy’s, the time stamp on the sheriff’s video recorder was set properly.
At 4:00 PM, Murphy sat down at a desk in the third-floor security office and started watching video.
There were four cameras on the outside of the building, but only two of them had views of the street. One camera was aimed at the prisoner gate at the back of the building and another monitored the main door facing Tulane Avenue. One camera shot images of Tulane and Broad, where there were too many cars to count. The last camera had a view of South White Street, which ran along the west side of the courthouse.
Murphy watched the recording from the camera facing South White Street at four times bodytext speed, but even then it took until after 7:00 PM to get through it. By the time he finished, the courthouse was closed and a deputy had to let him out through the staff door.
Twenty-eight cars had driven down South White Street between 3:00 PM yesterday and three o’clock this
