After years of writing nothing but true crime, I've turned my hand again to fiction. Nobel and Pulitzer nominated novelist and short story writer Ernest Gaines once told me, "You can tell more truth with fiction than you can with nonfiction."
Here, submitted for your perusal, is the first chapter of my recently completed novel.
CHAPTER 1
"He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee." --Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
NEW ORLEANS -- 2:30 p.m.
The woman's body lay sprawled on the grimy floor. She was naked, her arms extended, legs spread. Dried blood caked her crotch. More blood had leaked onto the floor and formed a gooey puddle under her buttocks.
Homicide detectives Sean Murphy and Juan Gaudet stood near the dead woman's feet, looking down at her.
"He hurt her before he killed her," Murphy said.
Gaudet nodded. "Looks that way." He let out a deep breath. "You think it's our guy?"
"She's got ligature marks on her neck."
"But no plastic cable tie," Gaudet said.
Murphy took a careful step toward the woman's head and leaned forward to get a better look at her neck. The ligature contained tiny ridge impressions, like those found on a cable tie. "He must have cut it off."
"But why?" Gaudet said. "He left them on the other victims."
"It's him."
"What makes you so sure?"
"I got a feeling."
"You got a feeling?" Gaudet said, an edge of sarcasm in his voice to let his partner know he wasn't buying it.
Murphy nodded. "It feels like our guy. The way he put her on display, right in the middle of the dance floor. She looks like she's been sacrificed on an altar."
"The other ones weren't posed."
"They just weren't this obvious," Murphy said, "but I bet if we go back and look at the crime scene photos, we'll see it."
"Like one of those pictures you stare at until you see the hidden image?"
Murphy ignored the question as he stepped over the victim's outstretched left arm and squatted beside her head. Staring at the dead woman's face, he said, "He's getting more into the act itself. He likes it. He's gaining confidence and developing into a more sophisticated killer."
The crime scene was inside an old club on North Rampart Street called the Destiny Lounge, a black juke joint a few blocks from Elysian Fields Avenue, in the Upper 9th Ward. The club had been closed since Katrina. For a long time after the storm, the Destiny Lounge had been a place where bums took a shit and junkies came to get high. Several months back the city finally boarded up the doors and windows.
Murphy stood and shined his flashlight at the ceiling, amazed that the mirrored disco ball still hung over the dance floor.
An overweight uniformed cop stood just inside the half-open front door. Murphy recognized him but couldn't remember his name. "Who called it in?" Murphy asked.
"Anonymous 9-1-1 call," the fat cop said.
"Some dope fiend would be my guess," Gaudet offered.
"A dope fiend with a conscience?" Murphy asked.
"I bet he fucked her first."
"The killer?"
"No," Gaudet said. "The 9-1-1 caller."
"She's kind of ripe."
"Still, piece of ass lying there like that, these junkies don't care. I bet there's more than one sperm sample in her -- one from the killer, one from the caller."
"She's a twenty-five dollar crackwhore," Murphy said, "which means we're probably going to find a whole sperm bank inside of her." He shined his flashlight around the bar. The dead woman's clothes were gone.
Outside, the late July sun beat down on the city through a cloudless sky. The heat radiating inside the sealed building was so thick Murphy felt like he could set his notepad and flashlight on top of it. Sweat ran down his face. His shirt and suit coat were stuck to his back.
Hardly any of that blinding sunlight, though, penetrated the tomb-like interior of the bar. The plywood covering the club's doors and windows hadn't keep out the victim, or the killer, or the transient who found the body, but it kept out the light. The only ambient illumination came from the halfway propped open front door.
"How'd the first officers get in?" Gaudet asked the fat uniform cop.
The patrolman pointed toward a back room. "A door in there has been pried off the hinges. It's leaning up against the frame, but it's pretty easy to move."
"Is that how you got in?" Murphy asked.
The cop nodded.
"What about the front door?"
"It was chained shut from the inside. We used a tire tool to bust open the padlock so we could get some light in here, and some fresh air."
Gaudet turned to his partner. "You're the Homicide Division's expert on dead women. How long do you think she's been here?"
Murphy painted the body with his flashlight. Then he took a big whiff of the air. "I'd say at least two days."
The front door banged open as a uniformed sergeant took a half step into the building. "Hey, Murph ... " The sergeant looked around like someone who had just walked into a dark movie theater. "Where the hell are you?"
Murphy waved his flashlight. "Right here."
"Coroner's man says it'll be at least an hour before he can get here. They're pulling a floater out of the river by the French Market. The body got hung up on a pylon."
"Male or female?"
"Female."
"A local girl?"
The sergeant shook his head. "Tourist. They already got her I-D'd. Her boyfriend reported her missing yesterday. He said they were having sex on that old pier up by the zoo. Somehow she fell in. I guess she couldn't swim."
Great, Murphy thought. Another hour standing around inside a sauna with a rotting corpse. By law, even Homicide couldn't move a body until the coroner's investigator got to the scene.
He and Gaudet went back to examining the victim.
She was black, twenty to twenty-five years old, and badly swollen. Her tongue was the color of chocolate syrup. Her eyes were open and bulging out of her face. The whites had turned dark from the burst blood vessels.
Textbook strangulation.
The ligature marks, the bruising left by whatever had been used to choke her, looked like they encircled her neck. When the coroner's investigator got there, they could roll the body and be sure, but Murphy was betting she had been strangled with a cable tie.
The woman had been skinny but the stretch marks on her belly and hips indicated she'd had at least one child. Scabs and needle marks dotted her arms and legs. Three of the fingernails on her right hand were broken.
She fit the profile of the others. Six previous murders in twelve months, all fairly young, all prostitutes, all victims the department brass called women with high-risk lifestyles. All but the first had been strangled with heavy-duty cable ties, thick plastic bands with a one-way ratcheted lock on one end that tightens but doesn't loosen. The only way to remove a cable tie once it's on is to cut it off.
"What are you thinking?" Gaudet said.
Murphy shook his head to clear it. He'd been staring down into the dead girl's blood-soaked eyes, but there wasn't anything behind them. Everything she had ever been, every dream she'd ever had, every memory -- good, bad, or ugly -- was gone. Nobody starts out in life wanting to be a junkie prostitute, but that's all this poor woman would be remembered as, assuming she was remembered at all. But even if she wasn't, she would exist forever in the files of the New Orleans Police Department as a dead hooker, murder number one hundred and something, whatever the count was up to as of this afternoon.
"Hey, partner," Gaudet said, "don't get too wrapped up in this shit. It's just another case."
Murphy looked at him. "You think they'll finally admit it?"
"Your serial killer theory?"
"I think we're past the theory part."
"Brother, you had me convinced after murder number three," Gaudet said. "But I'm not in charge. I just work here."
"I'm going to talk to the captain again. We need a task force. We need resources. If we don't catch this guy, he's going to keep going and going."
Gaudet's laugh sounded like the bark of a hyena. "Just like the bunny."
Murphy cracked a smile. "Yeah, just like the Energizer bunny."
***
Crime scene techs took pictures of the dead woman and the inside of the bar. They also measured how far the body was from fixed objects around the room, and from the back door, the most likely point of entry. They plotted the distances and directions on a diagram. Forty-eight feet separated the back door from the woman's body.
While everyone waited for the coroner's investigator to show up, Murphy managed to talk one of the techs, a woman whom he guessed weighed about 130 pounds, into letting him drag her around on the floor. Murphy paced off fifty feet of floor, on the opposite side of the club from the back door and the victim's body, then asked the tech to lie on her back. He dragged her one way, then dragged her back. After a little experimentation, he found out it was easiest to pull her by her feet.
"Not this method acting shit again," Gaudet said as he watched his partner drag the crime scene tech across the filthy dance floor.
Breathing hard, Murphy said, "It works, I'm telling you. You get inside a person's head and you can figure out how and why he does what he does."
"How do you know he dragged her? He could have carried her."
"They call it dead weight for a reason," Murphy said. "If he choked her unconscious while they were outside, he had to get her in here somehow. Lifting and carrying an unconscious or dead adult by yourself, even a female, is nearly impossible."
"You carry a lot of unconscious or dead women, do you?"
"If you don't believe me," Murphy pointed to the crime scene tech lying at his feet, "try carrying her from the back door to here."
"He ain't carrying me nowhere," the tech said. "That's enough of this bullshit."
"Maybe they walked in together," Gaudet said.
"Could be, but I don't picture our guy as a smooth talker. He's not Ted Bundy." Murphy stared at their victim for a half-minute. "I picture him as shy around women. I think he approached her on the street, tells her what he wants. They make a deal, he shows her some money. Then they go down the side of the building or come around the back to take care of business. But he grabs her and chokes her out, or maybe he slugs her with something. Either way, he brings her in here unconscious. There's no way she comes in here willingly just to have sex. This place is too nasty, even for a crackwhore."
"He would've had to know he could get inside."
"He scouted it out ahead of time. He was probably the one who took the door off the hinges." Murphy looked down at the crime scene tech still lying on the floor. "Can you check the hinges and the pins to see if there are any fresh tool marks? I want to know if they look like they've been taken apart recently."
"Can I get up now?"
Murphy ignored her. "We need more light in here. This dance floor is covered in grime. If he dragged her in here, she would have left a trail, maybe even some hair. Look for shoe impressions, too."
The crime scene tech held her hand up to Murphy. "Are you going to help me up?"
***
It was almost five o'clock when the coroner's investigator showed up. By that time Murphy was so hot he had stopped sweating. From his Boy Scout days he seemed to remember that was one of the signs of heat exhaustion, or heat stroke, heat something.
The dead prostitute -- he and Gaudet had already decided that's what she was -- had no pockets to empty, nor possessions to catalogue. Nothing but injuries to document and photograph.
The coroner's investigator examined the woman's body by flashlight. He started with her scalp and began working his way toward her toes. He stopped halfway. Murphy, who was looking over the investigator's shoulder, saw the tip of a dark object protruding from the woman's rectum. "What is that?" Murphy said.
The investigator angled his head down for a better look. "I don't know."
"Guess."
The man flicked at the object with a latex-covered fingernail. It clinked. "Sounds like glass."
"Glass?"
The investigator probed with his finger, then nodded. "It feels like a bottle." He cast a quick glance around the abandoned bar. "Probably a beer bottle."
"The whole thing?"
"That'd be my guess. The tapered neck would make insertion a little easier, but we'll have to wait until the autopsy to remove it."
"That's a new twist," Gaudet said, "sodomizing her like that." He looked at Murphy. "None of the others had anything like that done to them." He paused for several seconds. "You still think it's your guy?"
"He's not my guy. He's our guy?"
"You know what I mean."
"Yeah, I think it's our guy. He's just ratcheting things up a notch and getting off on causing more pain. Maybe that's why the cable tie is gone. Maybe he cut if off so he could keep her alive while he tortured her."
"He must have left something behind," Gaudet said. "He either raped her, or jacked off on her, or licked her, or maybe he just jizzed on the floor. One way or the other, though, he had to have left some DNA behind."
"Don't you think he knows about DNA?" Murphy said.
"Maybe he's not a CSI fan."
"He hasn't left any yet."
Gaudet pointed to the body. "He's never done this before, either. You said he's ratcheting things up and getting off on what he's doing."
"We'll see," Murphy said, though he didn't believe they would find anything. This killer was too smart for that.
Gaudet shuffled his feet around like he was suddenly uncomfortable.
"What's wrong?" Murphy said.
"When are you going to talk to the captain?"
Murphy glanced at his watch. "Tonight," he said. "I'm going to catch him before he leaves the office."
"He's already told you no, twice I think. You keep fucking with him, he's going to see to it you get fired ... again."
"Maybe." Murphy looked around the filthy, abandoned bar, then back down at the dead woman. "But I'll do whatever it takes to catch this sick bastard."
