Murphy glanced at his partner, standing beside him like a silent, 260-pound Buddha. “You got anything to say?”

Gaudet rolled his eyes. “I’m going to let you two crazy Irishmen fight it out.”

Murphy took a deep breath. Sometimes his partner’s lack of passion for the job infuriated him. He stared back across the desk. “Captain, these cases are linked, and the killer is getting more vicious. This time he kept the victim alive in order to torture her before she died.”

“You don’t know that,” Donovan said. “Any additional injuries the killer inflicted on the victim could have been postmortem.”

“She bled when he shoved a beer bottle into her rectum, something she would not have done had she already been dead. He’s starting to get off on hurting them, and he’s sped up his pattern.”

“There is no pattern,” Donovan said. “These cases aren’t connected.”

Murphy plunged forward. “The first six were roughly one every other month. Today is only the thirty-fifth day since the last killing. The next one will be even sooner.”

A blanket of silence settled over the room.

Murphy finally broke it. “We need a task force. This guy is not going to stop killing until we catch him.”

“Your time line is a load of crap,” Donovan shouted. “There has never been a serial killer in New Orleans, and we sure as hell aren’t going to have one on my watch.”

“The Axman.”

“What?”

“There was a serial killer here known as the Axman.”

“What are you talking about?”

“He attacked more than a dozen people and killed at least six of them,” Murphy said. “All with an ax. He even wrote a letter to the Times-Picayune and gave himself a name-the Axman.”

“When did this happen?” Donovan demanded.