Behind him, Gaudet said, “What are you going to do?”

“Give the rank one more chance to come clean about what’s going on.

And if they don’t?

If these girls knew there was a killer out here hunting them like animals, they’d be more careful. They wouldn’t get into cars with customers they don’t know. They could work in pairs, watch each other’s backs.”

“Or they could quit hooking,” Gaudet said.

“How likely is that?”

“And if the rank still won’t own up to the truth?”

“I’m going to do what I said.”

“Will she talk to you?”

Murphy nodded toward the body. “If it’s about a serial killer, yeah.

Hell hath no fury, my brother.”

How did the killer get her there?

It was a question Sean Murphy had been wrestling with since he first got to the South Jeff Davis crime scene.

He had shown a photo of the victim’s face to a couple of vice detectives. They knew her by sight but couldn’t remember her name. One of the vice cops remembered seeing her a couple of times working on Tulane near the courthouse.

There’s no way, Murphy thought, she would have walked the eight blocks from criminal district court to the Jeff Davis overpass with a john, not when the storm had left plenty of abandoned houses and empty buildings in between where she could knock out a two-minute blow job or a quick bend-over.

The logical answer was a car. Whether she’d gone voluntarily or involuntarily, the killer had driven her to the overpass.

Inside the Homicide office, sitting behind his shared desk-there were ten desks for sixteen detectives-Murphy typed out an intradepartmental memo, a Form 105, requesting that every platoon and shift commander in the city ask at roll call if any officer had seen anything suspicious or had taken note of any cars parked near Central Lockup, the still-abandoned police headquarters building, or the courthouse last night.