something with her right now. She will not live much longer in that box, especially if the hurricane knocks the house down around her.
If he wants to make a statement, he must hurry.
When Murphy ducked into the Homicide office at five o’clock, it was raining buckets outside. As he stripped off his raincoat, he was trying to come to terms with the fact that he wasn’t going to find the mayor’s daughter or the serial killer before the storm hit. That meant Kiesha Guidry was going to be dead when they found her, if she wasn’t dead already.
Today had been his last chance, and he had failed. He was out of leads and out of ideas.
For the last several hours, Murphy had followed up on the divorce files from the clerk of court. With Marcy Edwards dead, there were only two women left on his list who bore any resemblance to the killer’s most recent victims.
According to the divorce petitions, one woman lived in a house in Gentilly; the other one lived in an apartment uptown. Murphy had cruised both addresses, looking for anyone who stood out, anyone who might be watching. Then he knocked on both doors. Not surprisingly, with a storm about to flatten the city, no one was home.
But the addresses listed in the divorce files did not match those on the women’s driver’s licenses. That gave Murphy two more places to look. Again, though, he came up empty. There were no suspicious characters lurking around either address, nor had anyone answered his knock.
Everyone who could get out of town had already left.
He had four more divorce files in his briefcase and driver’s-license photos to go with three of them. But none of those women looked anything like Carol Sue Spencer or Sandra Jackson. He had no photo for the fourth woman. Her file listed an address in New Orleans East. Murphy went there first. For all he knew, she might look exactly like the other victims. But the house was abandoned, with smashed windows and a broken back door.
Four of the five addresses he had for the remaining three women-from court records and driver’s licenses- looked lived-in, but no one answered when he knocked. The fifth address was a vacant apartment. State law required drivers to update their licenses within ten days of moving to a new address, but no one obeyed that. Murphy still had not changed the address on his license after he moved out of Kirsten’s house more than a year ago.
He was almost relieved no one had been home. Knocking on those doors had felt foolish. What was he going to say if one of the women answered?
Hello, I’m a policeman and I’m here to warn you that you may be the next victim of the serial killer. The reason I think that is because you share certain characteristics with a woman I strangled two nights ago.
Maybe something less dramatic.
Murphy realized that his odds of stumbling across the killer while both of them were staking out the same woman’s house were astronomical, but he also realized that those six names were the only leads he had.
Timing is everything.
That worn-out cliche kept spinning through Murphy’s head. Just because he had not found the killer didn’t mean the killer wasn’t stalking one of the women whose files Murphy was carrying inside his briefcase. All he knew for sure was that they had not been stalking the same woman at the same time.
In a perfect world, Murphy would put a pair of detectives on each occupied address and hope the killer showed up at one of them. In the real world, he couldn’t do that. He had to find the killer on his own and make sure the man never saw the inside of an interrogation room.
Back in the Homicide office, Murphy stacked the six divorce files in the center of his desk. He opened the top file and started reading. He planned to go through each one, reading every document line by line. There had to be something he had missed.
Murphy was just opening the second file when the steel back door to the Homicide office banged open. He couldn’t see the outer door from his desk, but he heard the clang through the open squad-room door. He also heard the sound of boots rushing through the outer office. Seconds later, Doggs and Calumet burst into the squad room.
“We got him!” Joey Dagalotto said. He was carrying a folded computer printout in his hand. “We got the son of a bitch.”
Murphy felt his heart dive into his stomach. With conscious effort, he plastered a smile across his face. “Tell me.”
Calumet was carrying a brown accordion file folder. “We don’t actually have him. Not yet, but we think we know where he lives.”
After taking a deep breath, Murphy said, “Where?”
“In Mid-City,” Doggs said. “On South Saint Patrick Street.”
Murphy knew exactly where South Saint Patrick was. A few years ago his mother had gotten mad at her priest, and for months she had insisted that Murphy take her to Sunday Mass at Saint Anthony’s at Canal Street and South Saint Patrick. It was less than a mile from the Homicide office.
“You got a name?” Murphy asked.
“Richard Lee Jeffries,” Calumet said as he pulled a black-and-white blowup of a driver’s license from the folder and laid it on Murphy’s desk. The picture showed a thin, sallow-faced man in his late twenties or early thirties, with light-colored hair and dark eyes. He had a scar above his right eyebrow, just like the man the Lucky Dog vendor had seen running from the Red Door Lounge fire.
“What have you got on him?” Murphy said, feeling that if his heart sank any lower into his bowels he was going to have to go to the bathroom and crap it out.
Doggs unfolded the printout and read from it. It was a rap sheet. “White male, age thirty. One arrest, booked five years ago for obscenity.” The detective looked up at Murphy. “He wasn’t convicted and he got the charge expunged, but it was never cleared out of MOTION. We pulled a hard copy of the report from records. Someone spotted him jerking off in his car outside an elementary school. He was so busy pulling his pud that he didn’t see the cops roll up, and they caught him with his dick still in his hand.”
“You tracked him from the tire tread?” Murphy said.
Both detectives nodded.
“His mother bought them,” Calumet said as he flipped through a slim police notebook. “Mildred Jeffries, age fifty-eight, lives at one twenty-seven South Saint Patrick. Four months ago she had a set of Aquatred Threes put on a gray Honda Civic. Registration on the car comes back to her at that address. We ran the address, like you said, and came up with an ID on her son.”
Doggs was jumpy, eager to talk. “We went by the house. It’s a double. We knocked on both doors but no one answered. There was no car in the driveway, but fresh oil on the concrete indicates someone usually parks there.”
Murphy took a couple more deep breaths to calm down. “So all you’ve got so far is a weenie wagger whose mother bought a set of tires four months ago.”
The two young detectives looked as if Murphy had just handed them shit for a snack. Calumet spoke up. “He works at the clerk of court’s office, and the killer’s last two victims were recently divorced. We figure he might be using the clerk’s divorce records to select his victims.”
Murphy’s stomach dropped into the basement. These kids were good. The police department didn’t even have access to a database that showed where someone worked. “How do you know he works at the clerk’s office?”
“A buddy of mine in the Warrant Division dates a girl at the Police Foundation,” Calumet said. “He called her and got her to run Jeffries through the foundation’s computer system. They subscribe to a bunch of commercial databases that can pull up all kinds of information on people: places of employment, magazine subscriptions, professional licenses, real-estate holdings. She was on the road evacuating, but she pulled over and ran it on her laptop through a wireless Internet connection.”
Leave it to NOPD, Murphy thought, to have less access to computerized records than the civilian-run Police Foundation. He knew he had to get control of this situation. Left on their own, Doggs and Calumet would probably have Jeffries in custody within the next hour.
“Just because he works at the clerk’s office,” Murphy said, “and his mom bought a set of tires doesn’t make him the Lamb of God.”
“But you think he’s worth checking out, right?” Doggs said.
