"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.