Gaudet laughed as he tossed his briefcase into the passenger seat and slid behind the wheel. “I like you, partner, but you don’t know when to back off.” He cranked the motor and jammed the transmission into reverse. Murphy had to jump out of the way to keep from being run over.
As the Caprice spun around in the parking lot and raced away, Murphy looked at the stack of bills in his hand.
By 6:30 AM, every detective in the Homicide Division was in the office. Every detective except Gaudet.
“Where’s your partner, Murphy?” Captain Donovan shouted through his office door.
Murphy thought about telling the captain that his partner had just run off with a briefcase full of cash. Then he decided to wait. Maybe Juan would come to his senses. The story about the two of them conducting an undercover investigation into a widespread kickback scheme at city hall wasn’t bad. They could sell that to the feds, especially in a city as notoriously corrupt as New Orleans.
“Well?” Donovan asked. “I’m waiting.”
“He had to make a stop on the way in,” Murphy said. “He’ll be here soon.”
Donovan looked at his watch. “Classroom in two minutes. That means everybody.”
As Murphy drifted toward the academy classroom with the rest of the detectives, he tried to put Gaudet out of his mind. He had enough problems of his own to worry about. He didn’t have time to worry about anyone else’s.
If, and that was a big if, he survived the next few days-if he didn’t kill himself, didn’t get arrested, didn’t drown, didn’t get crushed by a falling tree-then he would decide what to do about Gaudet.
Four long rows of connected desks spanned the classroom from wall to wall. Behind each row were ten molded-plastic chairs. Murphy took a seat at the end of the back row. A couple of minutes later, Captain Donovan stepped up to the lectern at the front of the room.
He glanced at the assembled detectives, then looked straight at Murphy. “Where the fuck is Gaudet?”
Murphy didn’t know what to say, so he didn’t say anything.
Still focused on Murphy, Donovan said, “I told everyone to be here at six.” He glanced at the clock on the wall. “It’s now ten minutes to seven, and everyone is here except your partner. So where is he?”
Murphy had to say something. “I don’t know, Captain. He told me he had to stop somewhere, but he didn’t say where. Have you tried his cell phone?”
Donovan’s face reddened.
“How about you call his cell phone, Detective, and tell him that if he’s not here by the time this briefing is over, he is going to find himself back in uniform patrol, working night watch in the Seventh District, effective immediately.”
“You want me to call him now, sir, or wait until the briefing is over?”
“Right now.”
Murphy grabbed his notebook off the desk and walked out of the room. He already had his assignment: find the serial killer.
In the hallway outside, Murphy stared at his cell phone. Should he call, or just say he called? This shit was going to get deep. PIB, the DA, the U.S. attorney-they might already be investigating Gaudet. They could subpoena Gaudet’s cell-phone records, maybe Murphy’s too. He knew he needed to play this one straight. He had a direct order to call Gaudet, so that was what he was going to do.
Murphy flipped open his cell phone and dialed his partner’s number. The call went straight to voice mail. Murphy hesitated for a second. Whatever message he left might one day be played to a jury. The FBI might be tapping Gaudet’s phone right now.
“Juan, it’s Murphy. It’s almost seven o’clock. Captain Donovan told me to call you. Roll call started five minutes ago, and he said you better get yourself here quick, or your next police car is going to be a blue and white with the number seven written on it.”
Murphy hung up.
A man in a suit was walking down the hall toward Murphy. He was short and balding and wore horn-rimmed glasses. In his left hand he carried a large buff-colored envelope. When the man was a few feet away, he stopped and stared at Murphy with watery blue eyes so magnified by his thick lenses that he looked like an owl. “Are you Detective Murphy?”
Murphy slipped his cell phone into his jacket pocket and nodded.
The man stuck out his right hand, but instead of offering to shake Murphy’s hand, he held up a big set of government credentials. The letters FBI were printed in big blue letters across the top. Below that was the man’s photograph, his name, and the words Special Agent. “I’m Special Agent Walter Donce, FBI.”
In Murphy’s experience, FBI agents always identified themselves the same way, as if they expected theme music to break out while they were saying “FBI.”
“What do you want, Agent…” Murphy glanced at the bottom part of the agent’s credentials again, which the man still held up like a battering ram.
“Donce,” the man said. “Special Agent Walter Donce.”
“What do you want, Agent Donce?”
The FBI man slipped his identification back into his pocket. “I’ve been wanting to talk to you. I’ve had our Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico work up a profile of your serial killer.” He raised the envelope in his left hand. “If you have some time, I’d like to go over it with-”
“I don’t have time, Agent Donce. I’m busy trying to catch the killer, not psychoanalyze him.”
The FBI agent looked almost hurt. “All I’m trying to do is help, Detective.” He gave the envelope a little shake. “I have a tool that might be of use to you.”
Murphy shook his head. “A profile isn’t going to help me catch this killer. I’ve been saddled with your profiles before, and I’ve seen them mislead entire investigations. I’ve seen them cost lives.”
“A criminal profile is not a blueprint. It doesn’t tell you who the killer is, but it can-”
“Then what good is it?” Murphy said. “If your profile doesn’t help me identify the killer, why should I waste time reading it?”
“Serial killers share many of the same personality and behavioral traits, and identifying those traits can help us eliminate-”
Murphy cut off the FBI agent again. “I’m not looking for a personality type here, Agent Donce. I’m looking for one man.”
Murphy had no respect for profiles or the snake-oil salesmen who hawked them. As far as he was concerned, criminal profiling was junk science, like asking a voodoo priestess to assist on a case. He hoped that one day profiling would go the way of phrenology, the discredited nineteenth-century “science” of predicting criminal behavior by “reading” the bumps and dimples on a person’s skull.
There were too many cases in which innocent people had been killed because the investigators were following a profile instead of the evidence. The FBI profile of the Unabomber said he was a college student in his early twenties who drove an old car. In reality, Theodore Kaczynski turned out to be an over-forty mathematics genius with a PhD, who didn’t own a car and who lived in a cabin in Montana with no electricity.
The Washington, D.C., sniper, the Green River killer, the Baton Rouge serial killer, the post-9/11 anthrax attacks-those cases had all involved badly flawed profiles that misdirected the investigators, sometimes for years.
Donce dropped the hand with the envelope. “Our profiles nearly always turn out to be accurate.”
“That’s because you keep updating them even after the killer is caught. It’s nothing but Monday-morning quarterbacking.”
“That’s not what we do.”
Murphy pointed to the envelope. “Tell me about your profile.”
Donce held it out to Murphy. “You can have a copy if you want.”
“I don’t want to read it. Just give me the Reader’s Digest version. Better yet, I’ll give it to you. He’s a white male, twenty-five to forty, but probably on the higher end. He’s a loner. He’s clever but has little formal education. If he’s employed he’s probably got a fairly mundane job. He’s awkward around women. And he’s got issues with his mother. That about cover it?”
“That’s very much an oversimplification of what this report-”
“Tell me about his mommy issues. Those are always good.”
