“Does that look like a fucking kidnapping to you?” Deborah demanded.
“Not a very efficient one,” I said, looking at the huge smear of blood. “They left almost half of their victim behind.”
“What can you tell me?” Deborah said.
I looked at her, feeling mildly annoyed at her assumption that I would know what had happened instantly, on first look, by some kind of instinct. “At least let me read the tarot cards,” I said. “The spirits have to come a long way to talk to me.”
“Tell them to hurry,” she said. “I got the whole fucking department breathing down my neck, never mind the feds. Come on, Dex; there must be something you can tell me. Unofficially?”
I glanced at the largest splotch of blood, the one that started in the middle of the wall over the bed and went in all directions. “Well,” I said, “unofficially, it looks more like a game of paintball than a kidnapping.”
“I knew it,” she said, and then frowned. “What do you mean?”
I pointed at the red splat on the wall. “It would be very difficult for a kidnapper to inflict a wound that did that,” I said. “Unless he picked up his victim and threw him at the wall at about forty miles an hour.”
“Her,” Deborah said. “It’s a her.”
“Whatever,” I said. “The point is, if it’s a child small enough to throw, then she lost so much blood here she has to be dead.”
“She’s eighteen years old,” Debs said. “Almost nineteen.”
“Then assuming she’s average size, I don’t think we want to try to catch somebody who could throw her that hard. If you shoot him, he might get very annoyed and pull off your arms.”
Deborah was still frowning. “So you’re saying this is all fake,” she said.
“It looks like real blood,” I said.
“Then what does it mean?”
I shrugged. “Officially, it’s too soon to tell.”
She punched my arm. It hurt. “Don’t be a jerk,” she said.
“Ow,” I said.
“Am I looking for a body, or a teenager sitting at the mall and smirking at the dumb-ass cops? I mean, where would a kid get this much blood?”
“Well,” I said hopefully, not really wanting to think about that, “it might not even be human blood.”
Deborah stared at the blood. “Sure,” she said. “Of course. She gets a jar of fucking cow blood or something, throws it at the wall, and takes off. She’s scamming her parents for money.”
“Unofficially, it’s possible,” I said. “At least let me analyze it.”
“I got to tell those assholes something,” she said.
I cleared my throat and gave her my best Captain Matthews imitation. “Pending analysis and lab work, there is a very real possibility that, uh, the crime scene may not be. Um. Evidence of any actual crime.”
She punched my arm again, right in the same spot, and it hurt even more this time. “Analyze the fucking blood,” she said. “Fast.”
“I can’t do it here,” I said. “I have to take some back to the lab.”
“Then take it,” she said. She raised her fist for another devastating arm punch, and I was proud of the nimble way I skipped out of her reach, even though I nearly crashed into the male model who had been standing beside her while she talked to the feds.
“ ’Scuse me,” he said.
“Oh,” Deborah said, “this is Deke. My new partner.” And she said the word “partner” in a way that made it sound like “hemorrhoid.”
“Pleased to meet you,” I said.
“Yeah, sure,” Deke said. He shrugged and moved off to the side, where he could stare at Camilla’s rear end as she inched along the floor, and Deborah gave me a very eloquent look that said many four-letter things about her new partner.
“Deke has just come down from Syracuse,” Deborah said, in a voice pleasant enough to peel paint. “Fifteen years on the force up there, chasing stolen snowmobiles.” Deke shrugged again without looking. “And because I was careless enough to lose my last partner, they decided to punish me with him.” He held up one thumb and then bent over to see what Camilla was doing. She immediately began to blush.
“Well,” I said, “I hope he works out better than Detective Coulter.” Coulter, Deborah’s previous partner, had been killed as part of a performance art piece while Deborah lay in the hospital, and even though his funeral had been very nice I was sure the department was watching Deborah very carefully now, since they frowned on cops who developed the habit of carelessness with partners.
Deborah just shook her head and muttered something I didn’t quite catch, although I heard several hard consonants in it. So because I always try to bring cheer wherever I go, I changed the subject. “Who is that supposed to be?” I said, nodding at the gigantic bloodstain.
“The missing girl is Samantha Aldovar,” she said. “Eighteen, goes to that rich kids’ school, Ransom Everglades.”
I looked around the room. Aside from the blood spatter, it was not a remarkable room: desk with chair, a laptop computer that seemed to be a few years old, an iPod dock. On one wall, happily unmarked by blood, was a dark poster of a pensive young man. Underneath was labeled, TEAM EDWARD, and below that, TWILIGHT. There were some nice-looking clothes hanging in the closet, but nothing extraordinary. Neither the room nor the house it was in seemed like it belonged to somebody wealthy enough for a fancy prep school, but stranger things have happened, and there were no bank statements pasted up on the walls that I could see.
Was Samantha faking her own kidnapping to get money from her parents? It was a surprisingly common ploy, and if the missing girl had been surrounded by rich kids all day it might have created pressure on her to come up with some designer-label jeans of her own. Kids can be extremely cruel, bless them, especially to someone who can’t afford a five-hundred-dollar sweater.
But the room didn’t tell me enough either way. Mr. Aldovar might be a reclusive billionaire able to buy the entire neighborhood while flying to Tokyo for sushi. Or perhaps their financial means really were modest and the school gave Samantha financial aid of some kind. It didn’t really matter; all that mattered was to make sense of that horrible wet splat of blood and get it cleaned up.
I realized that Debs was staring at me expectantly, and so rather than risk another knockout punch to my triceps, I nodded at her and exploded into vigorous action. I put my kit down on the desk and opened it. My camera was right on top, and I snapped a dozen pictures of the stain on the wall and the area around it. Then I went back to my kit, took out a pair of latex gloves, and pulled them on. I grabbed a large cotton swab from a plastic bag and a jar to hold it, and carefully approached the glistening splat of blood.
I found a place where it was thick and still wet and twirled the head of the swab slowly through it, lifting enough of the awful stuff to make a useful sample. Then I carefully pushed the swab into the little jar, sealed it, and stepped away from the mess. Deborah was still staring at me as if she were looking for a soft spot to punch, but as I watched, her face softened slightly. “How’s my niece?” she said, and the dreadful red splat on the wall faded to a wonderful soft pink background.
“She’s beyond amazing,” I said. “All fingers and toes in the right place and absolutely beautiful.”
For just a moment something else fluttered across my sister’s face, something that seemed slightly darker than the thought of a perfect niece. But before I could say what it was, Deborah’s same old on-duty grouper face swam back into place.
“Great,” she said, and she nodded at the sample in my hand. “Get that analyzed, and don’t stop for lunch,” she said, and turned away.
I closed up my kit and followed Debs out the bedroom door and down the hall to the living room. Off to the right, Captain Matthews had arrived and planted himself where everyone could see that he was on the scene and relentlessly pursuing justice.
“Shit,” Deborah said. But she squared her jaw and marched over to him anyway, possibly to
make sure he didn’t step on a suspect. I would have loved to watch, but duty sounded its clarion call, so I turned away for the front door, and found Special Agent Brenda Recht standing in my path.
“Mr. Morgan,” she said, tilting her head and raising an eyebrow as if she were not quite sure whether to call me that or something more familiar, like “Guilty.”
“Special Agent Recht,” I said, pleasantly enough, considering. “What brings you here?”
“Sergeant Morgan is your sister?” she said, which did not really answer my question.
“That’s right,” I said anyway.
Special Agent Recht looked at me, then stared across the room to where Deborah was talking to the captain. “What a family,” she said, and walked past me to rejoin her generic-looking partner.
I thought of several very good comebacks that would have put her neatly in her place, but after all, her place was actually several rungs above mine on the food chain, so I just called out, “Have a nice day,” to her back and headed out the door to my car.
THREE
THE TEST I NEEDED TO RUN TO FIND OUT IF THE BLOOD was human was a fairly basic one, simple and relatively quick, so I stopped for lunch even though Deborah had told me not to. Just to keep things righteous, it was only a take-out sandwich, but after all, I had nearly starved myself at the hospital, and I had rushed away from Lily Anne to work on a day off, so one small Cuban sandwich did not seem like too much. In fact, it seemed like almost nothing at all, and I finished it in the car before I even got off I-95, but I arrived at my little laboratory in a much better mood.
Vince Masuoka was in the lab staring at something under a microscope. He looked up at me when I entered and blinked several times. “Dexter,” he said. “Is the baby all right?”
“Never better,” I said, a combination of truth and poetry that pleased me more than it should.
Apparently Vince did not agree; he frowned at me. “You’re not supposed to be here,” he said.
“The pleasure of my company was requested,” I said.
He blinked again. “Oh,” he said. “Your sister, huh?” He shook his head and then ducked back down to the microscope. “There’s fresh coffee,” he said.
The coffee may have been freshly made, but the grounds had apparently been sitting in a vat of toxic chemicals for several years, because the stuff was as close to undrinkable as something can be and still be liquid. Still, life is a series of trials, and only the tough survive them, so I sipped a cup of the wretched stuff without whimpering as I ran the test on the blood sample. We had several vials of antiserum in the lab, so it was only a matter of adding my sample to one of them and swirling the two together in a test tube. I had just finished when my cell phone began to chime. For a brief, irrational moment, I thought it might be Lily Anne calling, but reality reared its ugly head in the form of my sister, Deborah. Not that her head is actually ugly, but she is very demanding.
“What have you got,” she demanded.
“I think I may have dysentery from the coffee,” I told her.
“Don’t be an asshole,” she said. “I’m getting enough asshole from the Fibbies.”
“I’m afraid you may have to put up with some more,” I said, looking at my test tube. A thin line of precipitate had formed between the antiserum and the sample from the crime scene. “It looks like it’s human blood.”
Deborah was silent for a moment, and then said, “Fuck. You’re positive?”
“The cards never lie,” I said, in my best Gypsy accent.
“I need to know whose blood it is,” she said.
“You’re looking for a thin man with a mustache and a limp. Left-handed and wearing black, pointy shoes,” I said.
She was silent for a second, and then she said, “Fuck you. I need some help here, goddamn it.”
“Deborah, there’s only so much I can do with a blood sample.”
“Can you at least tell me if it belongs to Samantha Aldovar?” she said.
“I can run another test and find out the blood type,” I said. “You’ll have to ask the family what hers is.”
“Do it,” she snarled, and hung up.
Have you noticed how difficult it is just to get along in the world? If you’re no good at all in your job, people treat you badly and eventually you will be unemployed. And if you’re a little better than competent, everyone expects miracles from you, every single time. Like most of life, it’s a no-win situation. And if you dare to mention it, no matter how creatively you phrase your complaints, you are shunned as a whiner.
In truth, I do not mind being shunned. If only Deborah had shunned me, I would still be at the hospital admiring Lily Anne and her blossoming motor-control skills. But I could not risk being shunned full-time, not with the economy as bad as it is, and a growing family to think about. And so with a world-weary sigh, I bent my aching back to the dreary task at hand.
It was late afternoon when I called Deborah with the result of my test. “It’s type O,” I said. I did not expect her to respond with flowery gratitude, and she didn’t. She simply grunted, said “Get your ass back over here,” and hung up.
I got my ass back into my car and drove it south to Coconut Grove and the Aldovars’ house. The party was still going when my ass got there, and my parking spot by the bamboo-on-steroids was gone now. I circled the block one time, wondering if Lily Anne missed me. I wanted to be there with her, not here in the dull and deadly world of blood splatter and Deborah’s temper. I would run in, tell Debs I was leaving, and get back to the hospital—assuming I could find a place to put my car, which I could not.
I circled again, and finally found a place twice as far away, beside a large Dumpster in the yard of a small and empty house. Dumpsters are one of the new and fashionable lawn ornaments in South Florida, and they spring up all over our town like mushrooms after a summer rain. When a house goes into foreclosure, which they do quite often nowadays, a crew arrives with the Dumpster and empties the house into it, almost as though they picked it up by one side and poured everything out. The former occupants of the house presumably find a nice freeway overpass to live under, the bank resells the house for ten cents on the dollar, and everyone is happy—especially the company that rents the Dumpsters.
I took the long hike back to the Aldovars’ house from my charming Dumpster-view parking spot. The walk was not as horrible as it might have been. The day was cool for Miami, with the temperature only in the low eighties and the humidity no more than a steam bath, so there were still several dry spots left on my shirt when I pushed through the swarming flock of reporters gathered in front of the house and trudged on in.
Deborah stood in another group that looked like they were facing off for a tag-team wrestling match. Clearly the main event would be Debs versus Special Agent Recht; they were already nose-to-nose and exchanging rather heated opinions. Their respective partners, Deke and the Generic Fed, stood to one side of the main couple like good wingmen, glaring at each other coldly, and to Deborah’s other side was a large, distraught woman of around forty-five who was apparently trying to decide what to do with her hands. She raised them, and then dropped one, and then hugged herself, and then raised the left one again, so I could see that she was clutching a sheet of paper. She fluttered it, then dropped both hands again, all in the span of the three seconds it took me to cross the floor to join the happy little group.
“I don’t have time for you, Recht,” Debs was snarling. “So let me say it for you in one-syllable words: If I got that much blood, I got assault and attempted murder at the least.” She glanced at me, and then back to Recht. “That’s what my expert says, and that’s what my experience says.”
“Expert,” Recht said, with very nice federally provided irony in her voice. “You mean your brother? He’s your expert?” She said “brother” as if it was something that ate garbage and lived under a rock.
“You got a better one?” Debs said with real heat, and it was very flattering to see her go to bat f
or me.
“I don’t need one; I have a missing teenage girl,” Recht said, with a certain amount of her own heat, “and that’s kidnapping until further notice.”
“Excuse me,” the fluttering woman said. Debs and Recht ignored her.
“Bullshit,” Deborah said. “There’s no note, no phone call, nothing but a room full of blood, and that’s not kidnapping.”
“It is if it’s her blood,” Recht said.
“Excuse—If I … Officer?” the fidgeting woman said, fluttering the piece of paper.
Deborah held her glare on Recht for a moment, then turned to face the woman. “Yes, Mrs. Aldovar,” she said, and I looked at the woman with interest. If she was the missing girl’s mother, it would explain the eccentric hand movements.
“This could … I … I found it,” Mrs. Aldovar said, and both of her hands went up helplessly for a moment. Then the right one fell to her side, leaving the left in the air with the sheet of paper.
“You found what, ma’am?” Deborah said, already looking back at Recht as if she might lunge forward and grab the paper.
“This is … You said to look, um … medical report,” she said, and she twitched the piece of paper. “I found it. With Samantha’s blood type.”
Deborah made a wonderful move that looked like she had been playing professional basketball her whole life. She stepped between the woman and the feds and got her backside directly in front of Recht, effectively screening her out from any chance of seeing the paper, all while reaching out and plucking the paper politely from Mrs. Aldovar’s hand. “Thank you, ma’am,” she said, running a finger down the page. After only a few seconds she looked up and glared at me.