A Life Without Fear

by Leo King

  Sincerely,

  Nick

  “Who the heck is Nick?” Rodger stared at the letter before folding it up. He then went to hunt down a glass of whiskey.

  A moment later, a thought hit him. It was as subtle as an elephant on a unicycle. Taking out the letter, he read through the names again.

  “Henrietta Babineaux.”

  He’d heard that last name before. In fact, he couldn’t forget it.

  “Virginia Babineaux.”

  Rodger’s eyes widened as he realized the significance of the letter. Virginia Babineaux, otherwise known as “Virgin Baby,” was the copycat killer’s first victim. And Henrietta Babineaux was Dr. Castille’s first victim. The mother and daughter were both first victims.

  He looked at the date again. It lined up perfectly in the sequence of events leading up to the killings. His hands shook as he read the name on the bottom of the letter once more.

  “Nick.”

  The revelation was so overwhelming that he was forced to sit down. Finally, a name could be linked to the murders.

  “Could this guy be the killer?”

  As those words left his lips, the phone rang.

  It was Dixie.

  “Rodger? We need to meet with Sam tonight. It’s important.”

  Chapter 10

  When You Come Home

  Date: Monday, August 10th, 1992

  Time: 7:00 p.m.

  Location: Esplanade Apartments

  New Orleans City Park

  With a loud, throaty moan, Dixie fell forward, the strength in her arms suddenly giving out. For a few precious moments, she knew nothing but oblivion. She floated down an endless river where there was no worry and no stress—nothing but the feeling of complete release.

  Then she was aware of the warmth above her, the scent of sweat filling her nostrils, the clash in temperatures of hot body heat versus cold air. She was aware of the soft bedsheets underneath her, damp with perspiration. And finally, she was aware of sensual repetitive kisses to her shoulder blades, back, and neck.

  Turning her head as the kisses traveled up to her face, she met those lips with her own, kissing back until her senses fully returned, the trip into the blissful abyss concluded.

  Lying half on top of her and half beside her, with just enough of his weight on her to press her against the bed, Gino kissed her several more times. His dark eyes looked into hers. His deep, sensual voice asked, “Again, Dixie?”

  Dixie smiled. It was a secret smile she gave only him. She could feel the love radiating from him. It was like the warmth of the sun. But the reality of a serial murder investigation that wasn’t solving itself began intruding.

  Giving him a small peck on the lips, she said, “I’d love to, honey, but I need to get back to work. Let me shower off.”

  As he rolled over, she slowly sat up, enjoying the afterglow. After a few minutes, she slid to her feet and took the sheets with her, covering herself in a modest fashion. Behind her, she could hear her lover stretch and yawn.

  “I’ll make some coffee, Dixie. I need to get back to work as well.”

  Walking stiffly, she stepped into the bathroom, looked in the mirror, and saw that her hair was a matted mess. Oh, well. I needed to shampoo, anyway.

  The warm water felt good as it poured over her, washing away the sweat from the hour of love-making. Unlike the past few mornings, she didn’t ponder things too much in the shower, nor did she revisit her past. Instead, she mentally prepared herself for work.

  Getting out of the shower, Dixie dried off and then put on her robe and slippers. From the front of the apartment, she heard the television and smelled fresh coffee brewing. With a final stretch, her mobility restored, she walked up front.

  OK, OK. Enough playing. Time to work.

  As she entered the kitchen, she looked at Gino at the coffeemaker. He was wearing only his boxers and was humming along with the television to the opening theme to Night Court. His dark olive skin was in delicious contrast to his light green boxers.

  Dixie blushed as she watched him. Sometimes, she couldn’t believe her luck. It was as if someone had taken the hero from a romance novel and breathed life into him. Even after five years of living together, looking at him could still take her breath away.

  “Hey there, beautiful,” he said.

  She realized she had been staring at him. Cheeks still flushed, she looked away and cleared her throat. “Hey, hun. Shower’s free.”

  As he walked past her, he offered her a mug of fresh coffee, prepared sweet and light. “Then I better go get cleaned up.”

  Before Gino left, however, he leaned in and whispered, “Save me some coffee.”

  As he walked off, Dixie shivered a little. He was the only man she knew who could make “save me some coffee” sound sexy.

  Sipping her coffee, she headed to the dining room table. Spread across its surface were her notes from the investigation and copies of every important piece of evidence taken so far. There were the notes she and Rodger had compiled on the case, photographs of the crime scenes, and photocopies of everything from receipts to facsimiles. And lastly, there were photocopies from Michael’s notebook.

  On the other end of the dining table was Gino’s electronic word processor. It looked so lonely all by itself.

  She looked over all the information on the table. The task seemed positively daunting. She wished that Michael was out of the hospital and helping out. She had had many occasions to work directly with him and felt that the two of them made a great team.

  About a month ago, they had pulled an all-nighter at his apartment in the French Quarter. Not only had they closed the reporting on over fifty cases, but they had also cracked several new ones. It had been like a tag-team. She had analyzed each scene for raw information, then Michael had figured out the puzzle. That night had ended with the two of them getting rip-roaring drunk at a Bourbon Street pub. The following day, she had woken up back at Michael’s apartment with a hangover and a feeling of great accomplishment.

  She looked at the task before her. Well, Michael isn’t here. It’s up to me to solve this case now.

  She nibbled on her thumb.

  As she scanned the documents, she came across something that looked a bit odd. One of Michael’s notes, amidst a page of dates and timelines, simply said, “Check other restaurants. Commander’s Palace turned up negative.”

  Getting the oddest sensation that she had seen something like that before, Dixie flipped through her copy of Michael’s notebook. Near the beginning, she found what she was looking for.

  Of course! Michael marked it down right here. During the original Bourbon Street Ripper murders, Vincent Castille treated himself to an expensive restaurant meal after every killing, both as a reward and to establish an alibi. Places like Commander’s Palace, Arnold’s, and Café Giovanni. If the copycat killer is trying to emulate Vincent, perhaps he’s doing the same thing?

  Circling Michael’s note about the restaurants, she checked the rest of the notes for a follow-up to that theory. The search turned up empty.

  She leaned back and sipped her coffee. “Wow, I can’t believe something like this was overlooked. This is part of profiling the murderer. So unless the Nite Priory really is behind the murders, we could potentially use this to help identify our killer.”

  She triumphantly finished her cup of coffee, feeling as if she had done a rather solid bit of detective work. “I may not be a Michael LeBlanc, but I’ve got what it takes.”

  It was times like this that she was glad she decided to become a detective.

  Ever since Dixie saw her father nearly beat her sister and mother to death, she had wanted to be a police officer. Her adoptive parents, the Oliviers, had been supportive of her, although they clearly wanted her to choose a less dangerous profession. She joined the police academy right out of high school. From the moment she graduated, she was set on being a patrol officer, wanting to work on the streets to prevent incidents like what had happened to her.


  In fact, she initially rebuffed the idea of becoming a detective. However, that changed one night when she answered a call at the Fischer Projects, one of the most rundown and dangerous housing developments in New Orleans. A ten-year-old girl had witnessed her drunken father beat her mother to death and then run away. Dixie wanted to help figure out where the man had gone, but all she could do was collect evidence and pass it to the homicide division. It was that incident that made her realize that she had to go a step further with her career.

  So she enrolled in a community college and, going to school during the day and working at nights, got her degree in criminology in three years. After putting in numerous applications for the scant open detective positions, she lucked out and was accepted by the eighth precinct. On her first day in the homicide division, she was paired up as the junior partner of Kyle Aucoin.

  It was the beginning of her new life as a homicide detective.

  Gino’s strong arms wrapped around her, making her exclaim, “Hey!”

  His hair was still wet and he was wearing a robe. He looked over her shoulder and asked, “So, have any new leads with the case, Dixie?”

  She waved him off. “Case work, baby. You know I can’t share anything with you, or the evidence won’t be admissible.” She winked playfully at him.

  “Right,” he replied, taking her empty cup back to the kitchen and pouring her some fresh coffee. “Just like the case you had last spring when I recognized a photograph of the killer and that helped you arrest him. Completely inadmissible.”

  Dixie stuck out her tongue. “Oh, hush, you! The truth is, I feel like I’m on the verge of a major breakthrough, and I need to focus. Undisturbed.”

  He chuckled. “I think I liked the ‘inadmissible evidence’ bit better, Dixie. Don’t worry. I’ve got a lot of work to do as well. Producers want a finished script by Wednesday morning.”

  She nodded.

  He came over to the table and handed her the cup of coffee, looking at her papers again for a long moment.

  Giving him an annoyed look, Dixie shooed him away. “Stop that! Go do your own work, you annoying man. Go, go!”

  With a gentle chuckle, Gino sat down at his word processor. While the machine booted up, he put on a pair of reading glasses. His vision was fine, but the glasses kept down the eyestrain. Once the machine was ready, he slipped in a floppy disk. A few moments later, he started typing.

  She watched him work. She didn’t mind the reading glasses. She actually thought they were kind of cute. After a few moments, she asked, “So, honey, what are you working on now?”

  “I cannot tell you,” he responded. “My publisher will discard my manuscript if I reveal anything about it to my girlfriend.”

  Hearing him say that so stoically in his Greek accent, with those little reading glasses on, made her burst out laughing. Any tension that she had felt melted completely away.

  He just smiled at her and went back to typing.

  Once she had calmed down, Dixie looked back at the notes, particularly the ones on the Nite Priory. When she looked at the theory as a whole, she didn’t know what to make of it. It seemed like a most grotesque concept—a secret organization devoted to murdering like Vincent Castille, possibly even a fanatic voodoo cult. And they seemed to have links to the original Knight Priory of Saint Madonna.

  That or they’re deliberately trying to implicate the real Knight Priory.

  That theory was just as plausible as Jonathon’s statement of “I do believe the killer is playing the police.”

  She took a mental step back. My best chance to sort out the Nite Priory is to compare the locations of the murders with the locations of the kidnappings and try to find routes a group of people could take without being seen.

  She took out a map of the French Quarter and wrote “Nite Priory Routes” at the top of it.

  After marking down the locations for each kidnapping and murder, she started tracing routes throughout the French Quarter. She traced the main streets, side streets, and alleys, plus the dozens of winding paths through the courtyards every building seemed to have. She even looked at the sewer system, which was not deep enough to effectively use, seeing as how New Orleans was below sea level. With the routes plotted out, she leaned back, chewed gently on her thumb, and went into work mode.

  Immediately, Dixie noticed three things.

  First, each of the murder locations was in a building that had been abandoned for a long time. The equipment used in the killings would take a while to set up. The killer must have purchased these locations ahead of time.

  Second, each kidnapping location was in a fairly public area. None of the victims could have been taken by force, like with Vincent using Fat Willie. Even taking a drugged victim would arouse suspicion.

  Third, every kidnapping had taken place during the French Quarter’s peak hours. Witnesses would remember seeing the victims with a large group of people. So the Nite Priory has to be small. No more than three to five people.

  She was so engrossed in thought that she nipped down on her thumb a bit too hard. She mouthed a silent “ow” and shook it off.

  As Dixie performed her analysis on the map, she stole occasional glances over at Gino, who was diligently working on his latest manuscript. Her eyes softened as she watched him work. As beautiful as he was on the outside, it was his inner beauty that had won her heart. Among everything else, he was always waiting for her when she came home.

  Her cheeks flushed. Despite not being into soap operas or romance novels, she read everything he wrote. She was also the first person he knew who had figured out his pen name.

  If you took the short forms of his first and last names, you had “Gino Eli,” which is a good short name, but easy to trace back to Ginopolis Eliopoulos. However, if you simply went one key down on the keyboard from the letter I, you went from “Gino Eli” to “Gino Elk.” Instantly, you have people thinking of the larger cousin to the deer instead of the quiet Greek man down the hall.

  Simple, yet genius. But that was his style, to pick the solution that was so obvious, no one thought of it.

  Dixie returned to the map, tracing the victims’ routes with her finger. So, there’s no way any of the victims could have been forcibly taken. Every route would require crossing a highly populated main road at some point. So the victim had to willingly go with the killers.

  She compared her notes on the murders with her analysis. That means it would have to be someone the victims trusted. So maybe it’s a small group, like a bunch of partygoers, who chat up the victim and have her go with them? Then they bring the victim to an isolated location and kill them?

  Her brow tightened. The more she looked at everything, the less she liked the Nite Priory theory. Even that would attract attention. If it’s just one person, one killer, who’s charismatic and harmless-looking, wouldn’t that work? So each victim is approached by one person who is very personable, chats her up, and convinces her to go with them. It’s the French Quarter, so no one is going to pay attention to a woman walking off with someone so long as they look like they’re having fun.

  She leaned back and looked up at the ceiling. The charming solitary killer theory is much more plausible than this murder cult theory. And didn’t Jonathon say he thought the killer was playing the police? She exhaled deeply. “I only have a hunch to go on here, but what if the Nite Priory is a ruse?”

  “Anagram,” said Gino as he walked by.

  Dixie felt her brain slam against a brick wall. She looked blankly at her lover. “Ana-what?”

  He sat down, put on his reading glasses, and said, “Anagram.”

  Dixie’s brain had frozen. Anagram? What’s that?

  It took a few more seconds for her to remember. “Oh, right. Where the letters in a word are rearranged to make another one.”

  Smiling at her, he nodded. “Yes. Exactly. That phrase. Nite Priory. It’s an anagram.”

  Taking out another blank piece of paper, she wrote “Nite Prior
y” at the top. Her hand shook as she started rearranging the letters.

  “It is a trick used by writers,” Gino said as he continued to type, peering through his reading glasses. “Also secret agents and spies, people in secret groups, even newspapers. That’s how you get the word puzzles. Lots of people use them.” He chuckled.

  As Dixie worked, trying to make sense of it, Gino continued, “That one is a good anagram, but too similar to one that already has been used. It was in that movie we saw last year. What was it called? Ah, yes, The Silence of the Lambs.” He gestured dismissively and returned to typing.

  She didn’t hear that last bit. She was too busy staring at the middle of the page, where the efforts of her furious descrambling revealed two words that made her blood run cold.

  Iron pyrite.

  She felt her face pale. “Fool’s gold.”

  Gino took off his reading glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Yes. A misdirection. A lie. But like I said, not very original. Been used already.”

  My God, I was right. That’s exactly what Jonathon meant. This whole Nite Priory thing is a lie someone created to throw us off the scent of the real killer. And it’s worked. Someone has been playing us.

  Leaning back, Dixie rubbed her eyes as well, groaning in quiet discomfort. “Whoever is misdirecting us is likely the killer.”

  It was a rhetorical statement, but he responded anyway. “That’s what I’d say, Dixie.”

  She grabbed her notebook and flipped through it, looking for her record of who had mentioned discovering written evidence on the Nite Priory. When she found the page, she just stared at the note, her mouth tightening.

  Richie told Rodger that it was a book at Sam’s townhome. Jesus… we’ve been played by that bitch. And to think I almost actually liked her.

  Dixie stood up so quickly it made Gino scoot back. She grabbed the cordless phone and dialed work.

  A tired voice picked up. “New Orleans eighth precinct, Bourbon Street Ripper task force, Detective Rivette speaking.”

  “Rivette, it’s Dixie,” she said as she went into the bedroom, dropped her robe, and started getting dressed. “I need you to call every fine dining restaurant in town and find out if anyone of interest spent money on the nights of the murders. Anything out of the ordinary. Anything!” She clasped on her bra.