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.