HE PATTERN HELD TRUE WHEN I GOT TO WORK. THE SAME officer sat at the desk and nodded at my credentials; the same people crowded into the elevator as I rode to the second floor. And waiting for me in the coffeepot was apparently the same vile bilge that had been there since the dawn of time. All very comforting, and out of gratitude I actually tried to drink the coffee, making the same horrified face as I sipped. Ah, the consolation of dull routine.

But as I turned away from the coffee machine into what should have been empty space, I found an object in my path, so very close to me that I had to lurch to a stop—which naturally caused the venomous brew in my cup to slop all over the front of my shirt.

“Oh, shit,” said the object, and I looked up from the scalding ruin of my shirtfront. Standing before me was Camilla Figg, one of my coworkers in Forensics. She was thirtyish and square, kind of drab and usually quiet, and at the moment she was blushing furiously, as she often seemed to do when I saw her.

“Camilla,” I said. I thought I said it quite pleasantly, considering that my shirt was relatively new and because of her it was probably going to dissolve. But if anything, she turned an even darker red.

“It’s only I’m really sorry,” she said in a staccato mutter, and she looked to both sides as if seeking a way to escape.

“Perfectly all right,” I said, although it wasn’t. “The coffee is probably safer to wear than to drink.”

“I didn’t anyway you know want what,” she said, and she raised a hand, either to grab her words back from the air or to brush the coffee off my shirt, but instead she wobbled the hand in front of me, and then ducked her head. “Very sorry,” she said, and she lurched away down the hall and around the corner.

I blinked after her stupidly; something new had broken the pattern, and I had no idea what it meant or what I should have done. But after pondering for a few pointless seconds, I shrugged it off. I had a cold, so I didn’t have to try to make sense of Camilla’s bizarre behavior. If I had said or done something wrong, I could say it was just the cold pills. I put the coffee down and went to the restroom to try to save a few scraps of fabric from my shirt.

I scrubbed with cold water for several minutes without really removing the stain. The paper towels kept falling apart, leaving dozens of small wet crumbs of paper all over the shirt without affecting the stain. This coffee was amazing stuff; perhaps it was part paint or fabric dye—that would explain the taste. I finally gave up and blotted my shirt dry the best I could. I left the restroom wearing my semi-wet stained shirt and headed for the lab, hoping I might get some sartorial sympathy from Vince Masuoka. He was generally quite passionate and knowledgeable about clothing. But instead of receiving condolences and advice on stain removal, I walked into a room absolutely overflowing with my sister, Deborah, who was following Vince around and apparently hectoring him about something as he tried to work on the contents of a small evidence bag.

Leaning on the wall in one corner was a man I didn’t know, about thirty-five, with dark hair and a medium build. No one offered to introduce him, and he was not pointing a weapon of any kind, so I just walked past him and into the lab.

Debs looked up at me and gave me the kind of warm and loving greeting I have come to expect from her. “Where the fuck have you been?” she said.

“Ballroom dancing lessons,” I said. “We’re doing the tango this week; would you like to see?”

She made a sour face and shook her head. “Get in here and take over from this moron,” she said.

“Great, now I’m a moron,” Vince grumbled, and nodded at me. “You see how smart you are with Simone Legree halfway up your ass.”

“If it’s only halfway up, I can see why you’re upset,” I said. “Can I assume that there’s been some development in the Marty Klein case?” I asked Debs politely.

“That’s what I’m trying to find out,” Deborah said. “But if ass-wipe can’t get his ass in gear, we’ll never know.”

It occurred to me that Debs and Vince both seemed to be dwelling on “ass” this morning, which is not really the way I prefer to start my day. But we all need to show tolerance in the workplace, so I let it slide. “What have you got?” I said.

“It’s just a fucking wrapping paper,” Vince said. “From the floor of Klein’s car.”

“It’s from some kind of food,” the stranger in the corner said.

I looked at the man, and then back at Deborah with a raised eyebrow. She shrugged.

“My new partner,” she said. “Alex Duarte.”

“Oh,” I said to the man. “Mucho gusto.”

Duarte shrugged. “Yeah, right,” he said.

“What kind of food?” I asked.

Deborah ground her teeth. “That’s what I’m trying to find out,” she said. “If we know where he ate before he died, we got a good chance to stake it out and maybe find this guy.”

I stepped over to where Vince was poking at a wad of greasy white waxed paper in an evidence bag. “All that grease,” he said. “There’s gotta be a fingerprint. I just wanted to look for it first. Standard procedure.”

“Asshole, we already got Klein’s fingerprints,” Deborah said. “I want the killer.”

I looked at the congealed grease through the plastic of the evidence bag. It had a reddish brown tinge to it, and although I don’t usually hang on to food wrappers long enough to be certain, it looked familiar. I leaned over and opened the bag, sniffing carefully. The cold pills had finally dried my nose, and the smell was strong and unmistakable. “Taco,” I said.

“Gesundheit,” said Vince.

“You’re sure?” Deborah demanded. “That’s a taco wrapper?”

“Absolutely,” I said. “Can’t miss the smell of the spices.” I held up the bag and pointed out a tiny yellow crumb on one corner of the waxed paper. “And right there, that has to be a piece of the taco shell.”

“Tacos, my God,” said Vince with horror. “What have we come to?”

“What,” Duarte said. “Like from Taco Bell?”

“That would have a logo on the wrapper, wouldn’t it?” I said. “Anyway, I think their wrappers are yellow. This is probably from a smaller place, maybe one of those lunch wagons.”

“Great,” Deborah said. “There must be a million of those in Miami.”

“And they all sell tacos,” Vince said very helpfully. “I mean, yuck.”

Deborah looked at him. “You’re a total fucking idiot, you know that?” she said.

“No, I didn’t know that,” Vince said cheerfully.

“Why tacos?” Duarte said. “I mean, who eats fucking tacos? I mean, come on.”

“Maybe he couldn’t find empanadas,” I said.

He looked at me blankly. “Empa-what?” he said.

“Can you find out where it came from?” Debs said. “You know, like analyze the spices or something?”

“Debs, for God’s sake,” I said. “It’s just a taco. They’re all pretty much the same.”

“No, they’re not,” Deborah said. “These tacos got a cop killed.”

“Killer tacos,” Vince said. “I like that.”

“Maybe it’s a hangout,” I said, and Deborah looked at me expectantly. I shrugged. “You know, sometimes word gets around, like the burgers are great at Manny’s, or the medianoche at Hidalgo is the best in town, or whatever.”

“Yeah, but these are tacos,” Vince said. “I mean—seriously.”

“All right, so maybe they’re cheap,” I said. “Or the girl who makes them is wearing a string bikini.”

“I know a lunch wagon they do that,” Duarte said. “This very nice-looking woman, she wears a bikini? They go around to construction sites, and she does big business, believe me. Just from showing her boobs.”

“I can’t believe you assholes,” Debs said. “Why does it always end up about tits?”

“Not always. Sometimes it’s ass,” Vince said, cleverly bringing ass back into the conversation one more time. I began to wonder if there was a hidden camera, with a smirking game-show host handing out a prize every time we used the word.

“We could ask around,” Duarte said. “See if any of the other detectives are talking about a great taco place.”

“Or great tits,” Vince said.

Deborah ignored him, which should have made him grateful. “Find out what you can from the wrapper,” she said, and then she turned away and hustled out of the room. Duarte straightened up, nodded at us, and followed her out.

I watched them go. Vince blinked at me, and then bustled out of the room, mumbling something about reagent, and for a moment I just sat there. My shirt still felt damp, and I was very peeved with Camilla Figg. She had been standing right behind me, much too close for safety, and I could think of no reason for that kind of proximity. Even worse, I really should have known it when somebody got that near to my exposed back. It could have been a drug lord with an Uzi, or a crazed gardener with a machete, or almost anything else as lethal as a cup of that wretched coffee. Where was the Passenger when you really needed him? And now I was sitting in a chilly lab wearing a wet shirt, and I was pretty sure that would not help my already fragile health. Just to underline the point, I felt a sneeze coming on, and I barely got a paper towel up to my nose before it erupted. Cold pills—bah, humbug. They were worthless, like everything else in this miserable world.

Just before I melted into a dripping heap of mucus and self-pity, I thought of the clean shirt hanging behind my desk. I always kept one on hand in case of a work-related accident. I took it off the hanger and put it on, tucking the damp, coffee-spattered shirt into a plastic grocery bag to take home. It was a nice shirt, a beige guayabera with silver guitars on the hem. Perhaps Rita would know a magic trick to get the stains out.

Vince was already back in the lab when I returned, and we went right to work. And we really tried our very best. We ran every test we could think of, visual, chemical, and electronic, and found nothing that would bring a smile to my sister’s face. Deborah called us three times, which for her showed wonderful self-control. There was really nothing to tell her. I thought it was very likely that the wrapper held a taco and came from a lunch wagon, but I certainly couldn’t have sworn to it in a court of law.

At around noon the cold pills wore off and I began to sneeze again. I tried to ignore it, but it’s very difficult to do really high-quality lab work while holding a paper towel to your nose, so I finally gave up. “I have to get out of here,” I said to Vince. “Before I blow my nose all over the evidence.”

“It couldn’t hurt the tacos,” he said.

I went to lunch alone, at a Thai restaurant over by the airport. It’s not that looking at old taco wrappers had made me hungry, but I have always believed that a large bowl of spicy Thai soup fights a cold better than anything else, and by the time I finished my soup I could feel my system sweating out the unhealthy molecules, forcing the cold out through my pores and back into the Miami ecosphere where it belonged. I actually felt a great deal better, which made me leave a tip that was slightly too large. But as I walked out the door and into the afternoon heat, the entire front of my skull exploded with an enormous sneeze, and the accompanying ache kicked at my skeletal system as if someone was tightening vise grips on all my joints.

Happiness is an illusion—and sometimes so is Thai soup. I gave up and stopped at a drugstore to buy more cold pills. This time I took three of them, and by the time I got back to the office the throbbing in my nose and my bones had subsided a little bit. Whether it was the cold pills or the soup, I began to feel like I might be able to handle any routine pain the day might throw at me. And because I was more or less prepared for something unpleasant to happen, it didn’t.

The rest of the afternoon was completely uneventful. We worked on, using all our massive skill on what was really rather flimsy evidence. But by the end of the day, the only thing I’d found out was that Masuoka disliked all Mexican food, not just tacos. “If I eat that stuff, I get really bad gas,” he told me. “Which really has a negative impact on my social life.”

“I didn’t know you had one,” I said. I had the crumb from the taco shell under a microscope in the vain hope of finding some tiny clue, while Vince was examining a grease spot on the wrapper.

“Of course I have a social life,” he said. “I party almost every night. I found a hair.”

“What kind of party is that?” I said.

“No, there’s a hair in the grease,” he said. “For partying, I shave all over.”

“Way too much information,” I said. “Is it human?”

“Yeah, sure,” he said. “A lot of people shave.”

“The hair,” I said. “Is it a human hair?”

He frowned into his microscope. “I’m gonna guess rodent,” he said. “Another reason I don’t eat Mexican food.”

“Vince,” I said, “rat hair is not a Mexican spice. It’s because this came from a sleazy lunch wagon.”

“Hey, I don’t know; you’re the foodie,” he said. “I like to eat someplace where they have chairs.”

“I’ve never eaten one,” I said. “Anything else?”

“Tables are nice,” he said. “And real silverware.”

“Anything else in the grease,” I said, winning a very tough struggle against the urge to push my thumbs deep into his eye sockets.

Vince shrugged. “It’s just grease,” he said.

I had no better luck with the taco crumb. There was simply nothing there to find, except that it was made of processed corn and contained several inorganic chemicals, probably preservatives. We did every test we could do on-site without destroying the wrapper and found nothing significant. Vince’s verbal wit did not leap magically to a higher level, either, and so by quitting time my mood had not really burbled up into steady good cheer. If anything, I felt even meaner than I had that morning. I fended off one last telephone attack from Deborah, locked up the evidence, and headed for the door.

“Don’t you want to go for tacos?” Vince called as I hit the door.

“Go jump up your ass,” I said. After all, if there really was a prize for saying “ass,” I deserved a shot at it.