HE ADDRESS DEBORAH GAVE ME WAS IN AN OLD PART OF Coconut Grove, which meant there were no high-rises or guard booths. The houses were small and eccentric, and all the trees and bushes spread up and out into an overgrown riot of green that hid almost everything except the actual road. The street itself was small and darkened by the canopy of overhanging banyans, and there was barely room for me to steer my car through the dozen or so official vehicles that had already arrived and claimed all the parking spots. I managed to find a crevice beside a sprawling bamboo plant about a block away; I wedged my car in and took the long hike back, lugging my blood-spatter kit. It seemed much heavier than usual, but perhaps it was just that being so far from Lily Anne sapped my strength.

The house was modest and mostly hidden by plant life. It had a flat, tilted roof of the kind that had been “modern” forty years ago, and there was a strange and twisted chunk of metal out front that was probably supposed to be a sculpture of some kind. It stood in a pool of water, and a fountain squirted up next to it. Altogether it was the very picture of Old Coconut Grove.

I noticed that several of the cars parked in front looked rather federal motor pool–ish, and sure enough, when I got inside there were a couple of gray suits in among the blue uniforms and pastel guayaberas of the home team. They were all milling about in clusters, a kind of colloidal motion made up of groups—some doing question and answer, some forensics, and others just staring around for something important to do to justify the expense of driving over here and standing at a crime scene.

Deborah was in a group that could best be described as confrontational, which was no surprise to those who know her and love her. She was facing two of the suits, one of them a female FBI agent I knew, Special Agent Brenda Recht. My nemesis, Sergeant Doakes, had sicced her on me when an attempted kidnapping of my step-kids, Cody and Astor, had gone down. Even filled with the good sergeant’s helpful paranoia she had not managed to prove anything against me, but she had been deeply suspicious, and I was not looking forward to renewing my acquaintance with her.

Standing beside her was a man I can only describe as a generic fed, with a gray suit and white shirt and shiny black shoes. They were both facing my sister, Sergeant Deborah, and another man I didn’t know. He was blond, about six feet tall, muscular, and absurdly good-looking in a rugged, masculine way, as if God had taken Brad Pitt and decided to make him really handsome. He was staring off to the side at a floor lamp while Deborah snarled something forceful at Special Agent Recht. As I approached, Deborah glanced up and caught my eye, turned back to Special Agent Recht, and said, “Now keep your goddamned wingtips out of my crime scene! I have real work to do,” and she turned away and took my arm, saying, “Over here. Take a look at this.”

Deborah dragged me toward the back of the house, muttering “Fucking feds” to herself, and because I was so very much filled with love and understanding from my time in the maternity ward I said, “Why are they here?”

“Why are they ever here?” Debs snarled. “They think it’s kidnapping, which makes it federal. Which also makes it impossible for me to do my fucking job and find out if it’s kidnapping, with all those assholes in their goddamned Florsheims clomping around. Here,” she said, switching gears very smoothly and propelling me into a room at the end of a hall. Camilla Figg was already there, crawling across the floor very slowly on all fours on the right side of the room and avoiding the left side altogether. That was a very good idea, because the left side of the room was so spattered with blood that it looked like a large animal had exploded. The blood glistened, still moist, and I felt a twitch of unhappiness that there could be so much of the awful stuff.

“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.