A Killer Like Me (25 page)

Inside, he locks and dead-bolts the door, then points toward the stairs. “Up.”

She turns toward him to plead. “Why are you doing this?”

Holding the stun gun a foot from her belly, he triggers the charge.

She jumps back.

“Upstairs,” he says.

She trudges up the steps. The killer follows.

The scream pierces Murphy’s brain like a knife thrust.

The woman turns to run. Murphy lunges at her and catches the back of her nightgown. He hears it tear. She half turns and swings an elbow at him, connecting with the left side of his head, just above his ear. He wraps his arms around her and lifts her off the ground. She kicks at him.

“Be quiet,” he says. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

She screams again and Murphy clamps his right hand over her mouth. She bites him.

“Goddamnit, stop it,” he shouts.

But she doesn’t stop. She catches her breath and screams again.

Murphy shoves her into the bathroom. In the glow from the nightlight, he catches sight of their images in the mirror above the vanity. His face is twisted. Hers is terrified. For an instant their eyes lock in the reflection.

If he doesn’t shut her up right now, the neighbors are going to hear her—if they haven’t already—and call the police.

He wraps his left arm around her waist and grabs a handful of hair with his right hand. He tries to hold her still enough so he can talk to her, but she won’t stop fighting him. He shoves her face against the wall. Something cracks. Her nose. This time her scream is not one of terror but of pain.

Murphy clamps his right hand over her mouth. He feels blood spill across his knuckles. He slips on the tile floor. They fall. Instinctively, he rolls to protect her from the impact. He lands hard on his left arm. Pain shoots from his elbow to his fingertips. In the instant that his grip relaxes, the terrified woman twists away from him. She scurries toward the bathroom door, crawling over Murphy’s stunned left arm.

Despite the numbness in his hand, Murphy manages to close his fingers on the woman’s nightgown as she claws at the doorjamb. He rolls up onto his knees and grabs her right ankle. He tries to drag her backward, but his left knee slips in a smear of blood. As he falls, he dives onto her back.

His weight presses her into the floor, and he wraps his right forearm around her neck and wedges her throat into the crook of his elbow. He rolls onto his back and pulls the woman on top of him. He locks his right fist into his left elbow and jams her head forward with the palm of his left hand. A classic police carotid chokehold.

She still has enough breath left in her lungs to belt out one more scream.

He squeezes tighter, increasing the pressure on both sides of her neck, sealing off the two main arteries that carry blood to the brain. “Shut up, Mother!”

Mother? Where the hell did that come from?

She stops screaming. He can hear her gasping for air. Then she stops making any sound at all. Then she stops moving.

Murphy relaxes his chokehold. The bathroom is dead quiet. He slides out from beneath her and pushes himself up to his knees. She is on her back. He bends over her. The flow of blood from her nose has stopped. Her face is blue. He presses his fingers into the side of her neck. Her skin is slick with blood. She has no pulse.

A white-hot panic rips through Murphy’s chest, a panic more terrifying than anything he has ever known.

She’s dead.

She’s fucking dead.

I killed her.

His mind races back more than a decade, to his police-academy training. Like all cadets, he had to pass a CPR certification test, but he has never used it. He doesn’t know one cop who would go mouth to mouth with a shitbird on the street.

Now he needs it.

Murphy grabs the neck of Marcy Edwards’s nightgown with both hands and rips it apart, exposing her torso down to her belly button. He places the heel of his left hand two finger-widths up from the bottom of her sternum, on the bony center of her rib cage between her breasts, then lays his right hand on top of his left and interlaces his gloved fingers.

The he remembers the four quick breaths.

Shit!

He pulls his hands away and scoots toward her head. He lays his left hand on her forehead and curls the fingers of his right hand under her chin. Exerting pressure in opposite directions, he pushes the top of her head down and pulls her chin up.

Head tilt, chin lift, his CPR instructor called it.

Murphy pulls her jaw open and wipes away as much of the blood from her busted nose as he can. He pinches her nose shut, seals his lips against hers, and blows four sharp breaths into her lungs.

He straightens up and repositions his hands on her chest. With his elbows locked, he leans into her, pushing down on her sternum. Her rib cage compresses at least an inch. He lets up then pushes down again, lets up then pushes down, lets up then pushes down, counting out loud as he does so.

“One and two and three and four and five . . . ,” trying to time the count to the equivalent of eighty beats per minute. Her ribs crack under the force of the chest compressions. Murphy remembers his instructor said that would happen. He keeps going until he reaches fifteen.

Then he tilts her head back and lifts her chin. He pinches her nose closed and blows into her open mouth. Her chest rises as his breath fills her lungs. When he finishes blowing, he turns his head so that his left ear hovers above her lips. For a second he listens for her to breathe on her own and watches her chest to see if it rises by itself.

It doesn’t.

Following the American Red Cross protocols he learned so long ago, Murphy blows a second breath into Marcy Edwards’s mouth and again listens and watches for her breathing to resume.

He checks her carotid artery for a pulse. Nothing.

Murphy repeats the chest compressions, counting them out loud as he goes. “One and two and three and four and five and six . . .”

When he reaches fifteen again, he switches positions and blows two more long breaths into her lungs. Then he checks for a pulse. Fifteen compressions, two breaths, check for a pulse. Compressions, breaths, pulse. Compressions, breaths, pulse. By the sixth cycle, Murphy collapses, exhausted.

There are no signs of life. No miracle revival. Just a dead woman. A dead innocent woman.

The killer focuses his camera on the young woman tied to the chair across the room. Just like Sandra Jackson, Kiesha’s ankles are bound with parachute cord to the chair’s front legs, her wrists are tied to its arms, and a length of cord is wrapped around her upper body and knotted at the back of the chair.

He has pulled a pillowcase down over her head and cinched it around her neck with duct tape. Her terrified doe eyes stare out from two holes cut into the fabric. Beneath the pillowcase, her mouth is gagged with a long strip of tape wound around her head.

The overhead light is off and the painted windows allow only a trickle of outside illumination to seep into the room. With the camera’s infrared function switched on, everything in the viewfinder is green. Through the holes in the pillowcase, Kiesha’s eyes shine like headlamps.

The killer presses the record button and sees the letters
REC
appear in the viewfinder. A red LED light glows above the lens. Even that slight change in the environment heightens the woman’s fear. He hears her sharp intake of breath through the pillowcase.

He pulls the black ski mask down over his head, then slips the million-volt stun gun from his back pocket. As he steps across the dark room, he presses the trigger. Sparks jump between the prongs, flashing through the room like a bolt of lightning. For an instant he can see her clearly, and he imagines the terror-filled look on the pretty young face beneath the pillowcase. Behind her duct-tape gag, she tries to scream.

“Time to have some fun,” he says, loud enough for the camera’s built-in microphone to pick up the words. Then he jams the stun gun against the woman’s neck and fires it. A giant convulsion racks her body.

Standing behind her, the killer stares at the camera as the woman sags against her bonds, her limbs still twitching from the shock. He knows that behind the mask his eyes, too, are shining. “You said that I am impotent, Mr. Mayor. You said that I can’t get aroused. That I am a homosexual, a sodomite. Now, I will show you who is impotent. When I get through here, you will realize that you are the impotent one, Mr. Mayor. You and your entire police department. You can’t catch me because I am beyond your reach. I am the Lamb of God.”

He shoves the stun gun back into his pocket. Tucked inside his waistband at the small of his back is his KA-BAR combat knife. As the young woman begins to recover from the latest electric blast, the killer slides the knife from its sheath. His eyes have adjusted so that he can see her outline in the dark.

With two quick motions, he cuts the spaghetti straps that hang across her shoulders. Then he peels down the front of her black dress, beneath which she wears a strapless black silk bra. The killer slides the tapered point of the knife between the cups. Then he twists the blade up and out and slices apart the small ribbon of silk that holds them together.

He can hear her gasping through the pillowcase.

To add to her terror, he stabs the knife into the wooden seat between her thighs and leaves it standing there. Her knees clinch together, but when her legs touch the blade, she jerks them apart, but not before the edge nicks the creamy brown skin of her left thigh.

The killer reaches beneath the chair and lifts a plastic bottle of baby oil into the camera’s view. He unscrews the cap and pours the clear liquid across the young woman’s exposed breasts. She twists and strains against her bonds so much that she almost tips the chair over.

With deliberate casualness, he sets the bottle on the floor, then traces his fingertips through the oil, drawing concentric circles on her breasts until he reaches her nipples. He feels no surge of excitement at touching her oiled skin. In fact, if he feels anything at all it is revulsion. But the camera doesn’t know that, nor does she.

In anticipation of what she no doubt thinks is going to be a gruesome rape, the young woman throws herself into a spasm of jerks and twists. They are so violent that he has to wrap his arms around her to keep her from throwing herself and the chair over. Yet he continues to stroke her nipples.

After she exhausts herself, he hooks his left thumb under the tape around her neck and snatches the KA-BAR free from the chair seat with his right hand. Then he slices through the tape and jerks the pillow case off her head.

Like an unblinking eye, the red light above the camera’s lens stares at him through the darkness.

Grinning behind his mask, the killer stares back at his electronic audience. “Guess who?”

Sunday, August 5, 3:10
AM

Murphy sat on his sofa, Glock pistol in one hand, empty whiskey glass in the other. He rocked back and forth, unable to control the buzz saw of thoughts slicing through his brain. He shoved the pistol in his mouth and started to squeeze the trigger.

He had only vague recollections of coming home. The bloody surgical gloves he had worn were in the kitchen trash can, abandoned there when he grabbed a half-full bottle of Knob Creek from the pantry.

That bottle was now empty, sitting on the coffee table beside his empty holster.

Murphy lowered the gun. He had tried half a dozen times to go through with it, to pull the trigger and blow his brains out. Each time he got a little closer, putting just a little bit more pressure on the trigger. His Glock had an eight-pound trigger pull. He figured he was up to six, maybe seven pounds of pressure.

Next time it would go off.

He stared at his pistol, then at the empty whiskey bottle. There was a six-pack of Bud Light in the refrigerator. His throat was dry, like someone had poured cat litter down it. He climbed off the sofa and stumbled into the kitchen. He brought the whole six-pack back with him. He popped open one of the beers and downed half the can in a single gulp. The ice-cold liquid felt good running down his throat.

There was no way out of this. He had murdered a woman, broken into her house in the middle of the night and strangled her.

Dawn was less than three hours away. He had to muster the courage by then to do the right thing.

I need to be dead by the time the sun comes up.

He chugged the rest of the beer and then popped the top on another one.

What the hell had happened? he asked himself. Again and again he flashed back to that scene in the hallway. Marcy Edwards stepping out of the bathroom, the terrified look on her face, the scream.

It had been her screaming that had done it, that had forced his hand. If she had not screamed, he might have been able to talk to her. He could have started with the truth, that he was the detective in charge of the serial-killer task force. Then he could have lied, claiming he was following up on an anonymous tip. Someone had called in the serial killer’s address. He didn’t have enough for a search warrant, but he was desperate to stop more women from being murdered, even if it took an illegal search.

That story might have even flown with PIB.

But Marcy Edwards had screamed. And Murphy had strangled her.

What had happened next existed in his memory as nothing more than a blur of images. He remembered running through the house, looking for children or an infirm parent stuffed in a hospital bed. But the house was empty. He remembered stopping to examine the damage he had done to the back door, thinking how similar it looked to the pry marks on Sandra Jackson’s door. He remembered his plodding steps as he approached the bathroom again.

He remembered Marcy Edwards lying on her back, her nightgown torn open, exactly as he had left her. He remembered being surprised she hadn’t moved. This couldn’t be real. This had to be a dream. But it wasn’t a dream. She was dead.

He was afraid to touch her. But he had to. He rolled her onto her stomach and yanked her nightgown up high enough to expose her buttocks and lower back. He pulled his folding knife from his pocket and flicked it open. But he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t bring himself to carve into her flesh.