City of Heretics by Heath Lowrance

neighborhood, a white man, with longish sandy hair and a strangely wide mouth. Peter Murke. The descriptions couldn’t have been more accurate.
    But such is the world that three or four people spotting someone who looks like you in a neighborhood doesn’t convince a jury that you murdered someone. When Murke was arrested, some two months later, the DA’s office went over their evidence pertaining to every murder they were sure Murke had committed, and came up with only one they felt would stick. Thirteen-year-old Patricia Welling.
    But the cops and the DA, privately and in conference with Vitower, were convinced that Jezzie was actually Peter Murke’s last victim.
    Pieced together, it looked something like this: She’d still been on the sidewalk, three steps away from her car. Between two houses, a walkway of broken and buckling concrete cut through to the next block; the walkway was walled on either side by some scrubby but tall bushes. The killer had been waiting there, crouched. When Jezzie passed, he swooped down on her, slapping one hand over her mouth, dragging her back into the shelter of the walkway. At the same time, he plunged a knife into her spine—a gutting knife, most likely, the kind hunters use to gut deer—and effectively severed the bundle of nerves there that controlled her motor impulses.
    With his victim completely helpless, the killer dragged her halfway down the covered walk, straddled her, and went to work. He slit her throat first, a quick and clean stroke, designed more to silence her than anything else. And then he did what Peter Murke always did. He sliced her sternum to pelvis, like a surgeon, and proceeded to pull things out of her.
    The whole thing must’ve taken about ten minutes. Fairly risky behavior on Murke’s part. Some kids on the way to school the next morning found her, her heart, her liver, her intestines and lungs all laid out beside her and above her head. The killer didn’t take anything with him.
    A goddamn horrific murder, no two ways about it.
    But the night Jezzie Vitower was slaughtered, Tennessee State smoked Jackson State, 20-14, in the Southern Heritage Classic. The story of Jezzie’s murder got pushed to the back pages to make room for this obviously historical victory.
    That, more than anything, stuck in Vitower’s craw.
    He said, “Tuesday, Crowe. They’re going to take him up to Jackson, set him down in front of some shrinks, and decide that he just can’t be held responsible for what he’s done. They’ll decide he’s crazy and needs help.”  His smooth hands clenched tight and his jaw twitched. “Needs help,” he said again. “Poor old Peter Murke.”
    Chester said, “It don’t seem right.”
    Vitower glared at him. “No. No, it doesn’t, does it?  First, the prosecutor’s office insults me, right to my face, telling me that they aren’t even going to mention Jezzie’s murder when they present their case. They aren’t even going to mention it. Only one victim mattered to them, a little white girl from goddamn Bartlett, a little white teenage whore wandering around in Midtown all by herself, looking for drugs. Because you know, even in Memphis, where the population is eighty-goddamn-percent black, the only murders that matter are the murders of white people.”
    Chester squashed out his cigarette in the standing ashtray by the sofa.
    Vitower swallowed hard. “No offense meant, gentlemen.”  Crowe shrugged, and Vitower said, “As if that wasn’t bad enough, right?  Now, they’re going to declare him a raving nutjob and set him up as cozy as can be at the state loony bin.” 
    He slammed his fist against the desk. His rings thunked into the wood, leaving little round indentations.
    Crowe said, “You want to make sure he never gets to Jackson. Right?”
    “Yes,” he said. “That’s about the size of it, Crowe.” 
    One of his proto-Vitowers went to the little bar, mixed a short gin and soda, garnished it with a lime, and handed