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 for 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.