“Hey, partner,” Gaudet said, “don’t get too wrapped up in this shit. It’s just another case.”

Murphy looked up. “You think the rank will finally admit it?”

“Your serial-killer theory?”

“I think we’re past the theory part.”

“Brother, you had me convinced after the third one,” Gaudet said. “But I’m not in charge. I just work here.”

“I’m going to talk to the captain again. We need a task force. We need resources. If we don’t catch this guy, he’s going to keep doing it. He’s going to keep killing women.”

Crime-scene techs snapped pictures of the dead woman and the inside of the bar. They measured how far the body was from fixed objects around the room and from the back door at the end of the short hallway that led to the restrooms. They plotted the distances and directions on a diagram. Seventy-eight feet separated the back door from the woman’s body.

While everyone waited for the coroner’s investigator to show up, Murphy managed to talk one of the techs, a middle-aged black woman who he guessed weighed about 130 pounds, into letting him drag her around the bar. Murphy paced off eighty feet of empty floor. He dragged her one way, then the other.

“Not this method-acting shit again,” Gaudet said as he watched Murphy hauling the crime-scene tech around by her ankles.

Murphy stopped. He was breathing hard. “I’m telling you, it works. You get inside a person’s head and you can figure out how and why he does what he does.”

“How do you know he dragged her? Maybe he carried her.”

“They call it deadweight for a reason,” Murphy said. “If he choked her unconscious while they were outside, he had to get her in here somehow. Lifting and carrying an unconscious woman by yourself is a lot harder than it looks on TV.”