A Killer Like Me Read Online Free PDF Page B

I’m black and went to Delgado instead of Notre Dame, don’t mean I’m not ed-u-cated.”
    “I only went to Notre Dame for a year.”
    “Then you went to Loyola.”
    “Yeah, for another year.”
    “Still, you’re a white boy and you went to two fancy schools. It’s not my fault you weren’t smart enough to graduate from either one.”
    Murphy thought about the winter he spent in South Bend, the coldest he had ever known. Despite the freezing temperature, it had been a good year. His first time away from home. Then a king-size guilt trip from his mother—a Catholic boy’s rite of passage—brought him back. The scholarship wasted. Then a year uptown at Jesuit-run Loyola, until the money ran out.
    After that, he spent three years working on a tugboat. He was making good money and figured one day he might earn a skipper’s cap. Then he saw a billboard advertisement for the New Orleans Police Department. He could still remember the exact words: BE A PROFESSIONAL AND PROTECT YOUR COMMUNITY. JOIN THE FIGHT. JOIN THE NOPD.
    In the mid-1990s, New Orleans was the most violent city in America. A police recruiter told Murphy he could help bring New Orleans back to its former glory as one of America’s great cities. Murphy had bought that bullshit hook, line, and sinker. He signed up despite the huge pay cut. His uncle had been on the job then and tried to talk him out of joining the department. Murphy was hardheaded.
    His partner’s mock condescension snapped Murphy back to the present. “While you were wasting time in college trying to be a jock,” Gaudet said, “I was studying recidivism and probated-spiral-compression theory on my way to earning an associate’s degree in criminal justice from a fine institution of higher learning.”
    “Delgado Community College.”
    “That’s right,” Gaudet said. “But I like to think of it as Delgado University.”
    “It took you four years to get a two-year degree.”
    “I read slow.”
    “At least you learned the word
tryst
,” Murphy said. “That’s something.”
    “Speaking of tryst, what did you decide to do about that thing you were talking about yesterday?”
    “That wasn’t a tryst,” Murphy said. “When you move in together, the tryst is over.”
    Gaudet laughed. “That ain’t all that’s over.”
    Murphy nodded.
    “Besides,” Gaudet said, “I just like saying that word, feeling the way it rolls off my tongue.” He stuck his tongue out and flicked it up and down.
    Murphy ignored the urge to throw up. “I’m going to do exactly what I said. I’m going to give the rank one more shot. Then I’m going to do whatever it takes to get some resources for this case.”
    “I hope you know what you’re doing.”
    Murphy shrugged. “Me too.”
    By midafternoon, Murphy was only halfway through his list of license-plate numbers.
    The process was tedious. He had to run each number through the police department’s ponderous, 1980s-era computer system known as MOTION, which stood for Metropolitan Orleans Total Information Online Network. Some MOTION terminals were so antiquated they looked like 1960s vacuum-tube television sets. The program required users to log in with a social-security number and password for each query. For Murphy that meant more than thirty individual log-ins.
    The different programs within the system weren’t integrated. When the registered owner of a vehicle popped up, using a program called SLIX, Murphy had to jot down the owner’s name and date of birth, then exit the vehicle subsystem and log in to the criminal-history subsystem, called MONA, to find out if the vehicle owner had ever been arrested or had an active warrant.
    And so it went, back and forth between SLIX and MONA, running tags, then checking for criminal histories.
    By five o’clock he was done. Of the twenty-six tags from the courthouse camera, twelve of the registered owners had rap sheets. Of the six license-plate numbers he had pulled off the surveillance tape