He had learned something about himself that day. Seeing a dead person didn’t move him much. But killing something with his own hands, now that was cool.
He opened the closet in the shed and pulled out one of the size-two blue dresses that hung neatly inside. The lucky girl would get plucked from a running trail if she fit the part, just like one of those desperate women on the show The Bachelor, humiliating herself just to get a rose.
Louis Armstrong’s raspy baritone continued to play privately in his head and he swayed back and forth to the music. He ran his hand down the smooth fabric of the blue dress and pictured Julia Gooden wearing it, just like she had the first time he had laid eyes on her.
He shimmied the blue dress off the hanger, pressing it to his body, and recalled how there had been five blue dresses when he started.
Two down, three to go. Five was a potent number to him, representing the manifestation. A four-corner-marked square with the number in the center, bringing protection, luck, and power from the five elements: earth, air, water, fire, and ether, which would allow him the freedom to pursue his heart’s desire. The dot in the middle of the number-5 dice: Julia Gooden.
He killed the women as sacrifices to get her, dressing the other women up in Julia’s likeness for Erzulie to recognize what he truly wanted. And she’d give him Julia in the end.
He put the dress back on its hanger and moved to a table in the corner, where he found his pad of paper and two pens, one red and one turquoise, and began to draw his devotion. He had gone to St. John the Evangelist Catholic Church in Plaquemine every Sunday with his grandma while he was growing up and celebrated his First Communion in a little powder-blue suit when he was in second grade. But the real religion, what stuck, was what his grandma did in the pole barn in the woods in the back of their house.
He knew his grandma was Creole and proud of it. Although he was white in appearance, his grandma was mixed, with light brown skin and pale green eyes. Her daddy had been purebred black and had taught her what he had seen his own father do, passing on the mantle from his own daddy before him.
Some called it voodoo, others called it black magic. But never was it to be confused with hoodoo, which had Haitian roots. His family was New Orleans through and through. His great-grandfather’s ancestors came from Benin in Africa, the source of what would become voodoo in New Orleans.
Whatever people wanted to call the secret fringe religion he had discovered growing up, the man who had killed April Young and Heather Burns simply called it one word: “beautiful.”
On Sunday nights while growing up, he would creep down to the woods when his grandmother thought he was sleeping. He’d run down to the pole barn and watch his grandma standing in front of a crowded room, holding a snake over her head and chanting. She caught him once, staring in awe and wonder behind the pole barn door, and then chased him back to the house. She gave him an extra-hard spanking with a belt, but then soothed his tears as he lay in bed. His grandma explained what she was doing was as spiritual as what he was learning at St. John the Evangelist. She patted his hand and shared that there was only one God. But she also believed there were other spirits under Him, helpers who would carry the message between themselves and the God she believed in. And sometimes, if you gave sacrifices and special prayers to these spirits, the message would be put on fast track.
Through the years, he mixed the voodoo, a heavy dose of Catholicism that was already a voodoo staple, and his own later interest in black magic and paganism, the latter he picked up from a goth chick he dated in college. He melded all of them together until he found something perfect.
He went back to the closet and reached down to the second shelf and stroked the remaining long, dark wigs on the Styrofoam mannequin heads, thinking how Julia’s hair would feel even softer, so much more luxurious.
God, his erection was so enormous now, it hurt.
He pulled out a binder from the last shelf and sat down on the floor, thumbing through its contents that he spread out between his legs. The majority were stories Julia Gooden had written from her crime beat. Her line of work intrigued him. She obviously gravitated to the dark and violent. That had been their first connection he had recognized, a deviant common ground.
He picked up the last article on the floor and held it between his hands. This was the story that changed everything. The clipping was a picture of Julia and her son Logan accompanied by an article detailing how Julia Gooden had helped solve the case of her missing brother.
Even before that revelation, he liked Julia the moment he set eyes on her. She was striking in an exotic kind of way, with her thick, dark hair, large blue eyes, and an olive complexion. She was very pretty, but definitely not the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. The most beautiful had been the reason he and his grandmother had left Plaquemine and moved to Michigan, where they had relatives.
His uncles had covered it up for him. The woman, a girl really, was only nineteen. On the night he had followed her to her car after her shift working the counter at CVS, the girl’s fair, peaches-and-cream skin had blushed crimson in anger when she threatened she’d go to the police if he didn’t stop following her wherever she went, the library, the mall, outside her house, anyplace he could find her.
He was in his first year of college and couldn’t have that kind of spot on his record.
So he killed her. Slit her throat clean across with a hunting knife one of his uncles had given him for his sixteenth birthday.
The first time was always the most memorable. She’d always be his girl.
Still, there was something primal in Julia he connected with, making her his sole focus now. His first kill was becoming more and more of a distant memory. And then when he and Julia spoke, it was magic.
But the story about her brother revealed her secrets and resolve. Julia was the perfect woman, who had sacrificed so much.
And she was going to make him famous with her stories.
He scooped up the articles and shoved them back in the binder, which he carefully slid into its place in the closet. He then sat down on a folding chair in the corner of the shed and slid a DVD into a small TV and watched the recording of Julia talking to a news anchor from CNN about her brother. He was transfixed on Julia’s demeanor. She was composed and professional, never once breaking down or crying when she spoke about her brother. She looked ahead at the camera calmly and recounted the facts without a sappy display of weakness, just like he would’ve done at the age of six if someone from the TV news had bothered to interview him about his mother.
He and Julia were two peas in an odd pod. He reached down for the throbbing thing in his pants and began to touch himself. He closed his eyes and imagined Julia in the blue dress while the two danced to their song, the way her hair would smell, how she would whisper that she loved him, and then the look of shock and betrayal on her face when he slit her throat.
He’d tell her he loved her when she took her last breath. And then he’d take his own life, their paths finally unblocked in this world so they could be together in the next.
The up-and-down motion of his hand gave an electric jolt to every delicate nerve in his groin and his mind fixated on how he was going to get Julia’s attention. Not to mention the fact he was going to be a bona fide celebrity soon, up there with the likes of Ted Bundy, a pretty boy like himself whom he had long admired.
He’d worked so hard for this moment. None of the other bona fide celebrity killers had even come close to what he’d done. All the planning, the intricate steps, the pictures he drew, his disguises, and the clues he left behind that the stupid cops hadn’t figured out yet. He knew he’d need to reach out to Julia directly, because she was smart enough to play his game, where the cops were struggling to keep up. Julia would pay attention to him, and her stories would detail their black dance, until he killed her.
He was going to get his girl. And she was going to make him a household name for the ages.
Everything was coming fu
ll circle. And it was about time.
Normal life was so goddamn boring.
He closed his eyes and remembered the feeling of the blade of his knife severing the women’s throats, a hard tug across their flesh until the sharp metal sank in and worked its way down to the bone.
He liked the sound it made and the feeling of the women going limp against him after they shot their hands up to their necks in disbelief over what he’d done.
Stupid girls.
He was so close to climaxing when a loud knock sounded on the door.
“Are you still in there?” his wife called out, ruining the perfect moment. “You need to get moving or you’re going to be late.”
“Just finishing up some work. I’ll be right out,” the man said.
He cleared his mind and concentrated on his breathing until he felt his erection go down.
He then walked over to the closet and reached in for his uniform.
Time to be normal again.
CHAPTER 7
An adrenaline rush surged through Julia when she walked into the newsroom. Having stalked the stories on her beat hourly during her sabbatical, Julia felt a strong pull of anticipation as she took in the familiar hub of activity and sounds that were a newsroom: Reporters firing off questions in an intermingled chorus doing phone interviews; a 911 dispatcher coming over the scanner above Julia’s desk reporting a possible domestic in the Woodbridge neighborhood; the voice of a CNN anchor cutting through the noise from a TV mounted on the wall; and one of the copy editors and the City Hall reporter going at it in a heated debate because someone had changed the reporter’s lead and ran the story without telling him first.
Julia followed her familiar path to her desk, passed the sparse features department, half of which was gutted due to layoffs, and nodded a greeting to the sports desk editor, Scott Baylor, a sixty-year-old newsroom veteran a blink away from retirement. He had started out as a young reporter covering the Tigers long before the team moved to Comerica Park.
Baylor let out a low whistle as Julia walked by.
“Hey, Hollywood. Now that you’re a big-time author, I’m surprised you came back to us peons,” Baylor said with a friendly smile.
“Nothing could keep me away from you. How’s Betty doing?”
“The wife’s making me crazy, now that she’s retired. Too much time on her hands. The only way I’ll ever leave this place is if they take me out on a stretcher.”
“That could be arranged. I know a couple of guys who could take care of that for you,” Julia answered, and gave Baylor a wink. “Just give me the word.”
“Still a ballbuster. Glad to have you back, Gooden.”
Julia shoved a three-month pile of mostly junk mail off her desk and then filed a summary of her story for the editors’ daily ten AM meeting. Julia opened her notebook and took in what she had jotted down from her talk with April Young’s principal and the Heather Burns crime scene. She then blocked out the sounds around her and got in the zone.
Julia got as far as knocking out her byline when her city editor, Virginia Remi, approached her desk.
“Welcome back,” Virginia said. Virginia was in her late forties, with red hair and the loudest laugh in the newsroom. Virginia had gained Julia’s respect when her now–city editor covered the Oakland County beat and wrote an exposé that sank the former county treasurer for embezzlement.
“I’m not going to bother to ask if you’ve been following the news about the dead jogger in the church, because knowing you, you’ve been obsessing over it,” Virginia said. “For today, Robert Friedrich will take the lead, since he’s been covering the story in your absence. How about you make some calls to your cop sources, and you can feed him anything you get.”
Julia felt a blaze of heat move up her neck and she jumped up from her chair. “No way. This is my story. And in all due respect, the coverage on April Young has been terrible, and that’s being nice.”
“Is that right?” Virginia answered. She folded her arms across her chest in a defensive mode. “This is not a debate, Julia.”
“There’s been another murder. I was just at the scene. The woman was a jogger and she was found in an abandoned Baptist church, off Seven Mile.”
“No shit?” Virginia said, the interest of the new victim resonating in her voice. “You have an ID?”
“I have more than that. But I’m not passing it along to your new reporter. This story is mine,” Julia said.
Virginia took a look across the newsroom, likely at her new, poorly paid, recent college grad, Robert Friedrich.
“Okay. I’ll move Robert over to general assignment. What’s the latest victim’s name?”
“It was told to me off the record. We can’t go with it until the cops notify next of kin. She’s thirty-nine.”
“I want to go with the name. I don’t want to get beat by the Freep,” Virginia answered, using the nickname of the Detroit Free Press.
“No one else has the story yet. I know that as a fact,” Julia said. “I gave the cops my word we wouldn’t go with the name, and they promised I’d get it first.”
“Fine then, at least for now. What else do you have?”
“Both victims were runners, in their thirties, and the killer dressed them up the same way, with a long, dark-haired wig and a blue dress.”
“It sounds like a demented serial killer to me. That’s horrible, but I love it. What else?”
“The killer left behind a drawing at both scenes. The pictures were the same, an intricate hand-drawn red-and-turquoise heart.”
“This is good, really, good, Julia. The devil is always in the details.”
“I called an old source of mine back in New Orleans to verify something about the picture.”
“Right. I forgot you worked the cop beat in New Orleans before you came here. But why are you calling a New Orleans cop for a Detroit story?”
“My source, Doug Prejean, he’s a sergeant in the NOLA PD. He’s a great cop and he’s worked a bunch of these types of cases before. Prejean thinks the picture is an occult symbol, likely voodoo-related, and the killings could be some kind of sacrifice. Prejean talked with Chief Washington and he’s going to consult on the case. He’s got Michigan connections, and he’s flying in tomorrow to help the Detroit cops.”
“Human sacrifices, voodoo, blue dresses, wigs, and the occult. That’s a damn good story. Two bodies. We’re calling him the Blue Dress Serial Killer, you got that, Frank?” Virginia called out to a copy desk editor, who waved a jaded hand of acknowledgment in response without looking up from his computer.
“You want to label him a serial killer already?” Julia asked.
“You want to tell me you don’t think the killer is going to strike again? Two is all it takes. He’s got a pattern, and the FBI will likely be brought in. So ‘serial killer’ it is. Okay, Julia, go with what you have. Do your best to work your sources to give us the latest victim’s name on the record. I don’t want to get beat on that. And, Julia?”
“Yes?”
“It’s damn good to have you back.”
* * *
Julia spent the rest of the afternoon hustling down details about the two dead women and returned to the newsroom at five to file the story. When she was done, she pulled out a yellow legal pad from her top desk drawer and wrote down the names of both victims side by side. Heather Burns and April Young were both single mothers in their thirties and they were runners with the same lean-body type. Julia drummed the end of her pencil against the legal pad and tried to piece together other commonalities between the two women that connected them to their killer.
Julia’s thoughts turned to her boys and she hoped their transition to her going back to work went smoothly. She took a quick glance at a framed photo on her desk of Logan and Will taken two summers earlier. Logan’s arm was looped around Will’s shoulder, always the big brother and the protector, just like Ben had been to her. Logan flashed his trademark crooked smile in the photo, the exact same on
e Julia’s brother Ben had so easily offered up to her like a reward so many years ago. At times, Julia thought Logan’s resemblance to Ben was uncanny. Both her brother and oldest son had jet-black hair, high cheekbones, and dark eyes that tilted up on the ends.
Julia’s cell phone rang and she instantly recognized the number. It belonged to a now-sober, but still recovering, addict who had done a couple stints in prison, stole Julia’s credit card information nine years earlier, and threatened to come after a then-infant Logan if Julia went to the police.
“Hey, sis,” Julia answered.
“Wow, you actually answered,” Julia’s older sister, Sarah, said. “I figured you’d be out chasing down criminals.”
“I am. I’m working on a big story right now about two dead women. Both had kids, so it’s a real tragedy.”
“It sounds like you’re busy. I have an invitation for you, but if you can’t make it, that’s cool.”
Julia could hear her sister taking a deep puff on a cigarette, and she figured Sarah had snuck out in the alleyway for a quick smoke at the substance abuse treatment center where she was a counselor.
“Let me guess. A Marlboro Light break and you’re working the late shift. What’s the invitation?”
“Yeah, I’m just getting off work,” Sarah answered. “I have this thing coming up at the center. It’s a cheesy ceremony here where they recognize people who have sobriety anniversaries. Mine is eighteen months. I’ve been seeing a guy who’s going to be there, but I’d like you to come if you can. If you don’t want to or have other plans, I get it. Say no now so we can get this over with.”
You Fit the Pattern Page 6