Murphy waved his flashlight. “Right here.”

“The coroner’s man says it’ll be at least an hour before he can get here. They’re pulling a female floater out of the river by the French Market.”

“A local girl?”

The sergeant shook his head. “Tourist. Her boyfriend reported her missing yesterday. He said they were having sex on that old pier up by the zoo. Somehow she fell in. I guess she couldn’t swim.”

Murphy nodded, then remembered the sergeant couldn’t see him. “Thanks,” he said. Another hour inside a sauna with a rotting corpse. By law, even Homicide couldn’t move a body until the coroner’s investigator got to the scene.

He and Gaudet went back to examining the victim. She was black, twenty to twenty-five years old, and badly swollen. Her tongue was the color of chocolate syrup. Her eyes were open and bulging out of her face. The whites had turned dark from the burst blood vessels.

Textbook strangulation.

The ligature mark, the bruising left by whatever had been used to choke her, looked like it encircled her neck. When the coroner’s investigator got here, the three of them would roll the body and check, but Murphy was betting she had been strangled with a cable tie. Scabs and needle marks pockmarked the woman’s arms and legs. Three of the fingernails on her right hand were broken. She had put up a fight.

She fit the pattern of the others. Six previous murders in twelve months, all young, all prostitutes, all victims the department brass referred to as “women with high-risk lifestyles.” All but the first victim had been strangled with a heavy-duty cable tie, a thick plastic band with a one-way ratcheted lock that tightened but didn’t loosen. The only way to remove a cable tie was to cut it off.

“What are you thinking?” Gaudet said.

Murphy shook his head to clear it. He had been staring down into the dead girl’s blood-soaked eyes, but there wasn’t anything behind them. Everything she had ever been, every dream she ever had, every memory-good, bad, or ugly-was gone.