“All right,” Deborah said. “We lost enough time with that shit. Let’s get back to it.” She pointed at Alvarez. “I got no time for your crap. I want Bobby Acosta. Go get him.”
And as Alvarez sauntered out the door, I thought that suddenly half a million dollars didn’t seem like that much money, not for an entire eaten daughter. And because it was such a small amount, it also seemed like it wouldn’t be such a big deal to take it from Spanos for something so trivial as a simple phone call. Yet Deborah apparently felt absolutely no temptation, and even Deke acted like it was something funny and commonplace, nothing at all out of the ordinary.
Apparently Debs agreed. She straightened up and looked right at me. “Let’s get this done,” she said. “I want to know about that stuff—you called it punch. The stuff we found in the Everglades. It’s part blood, but whatever else is in it might lead somewhere. Get on it.”
“All right,” I said. “What are you and Deke doing?”
She looked at me with a repeat of the bad-lemon glare she’d given Deke. “We,” she said with a distaste that matched her expression, “are going to hit the last three names on the list from that dentist. The guys who had the vampire fangs put in.” She glanced again at Deke and then away, clamping her jaw tight. “Somebody knows,” she said. “Goddamn it, one of those boys knows something, and we’re going to get it from him.”
“All right,” Deke said softly.
“Well, then,” I said, “I’ll toddle off to my lab and get busy.”
“Yeah,” Deborah said. “You do that.”
I did that, leaving my sister with her unwanted partner.
NINETEEN
VINCE MASUOKA WAS ALREADY BUSTLING AROUND WHEN I got to the lab. “Hey,” he said. “I ran my ecstasy test on that stuff from the Everglades?”
“Wonderful,” I said. “Just what I was going to suggest.”
“So it’s positive,” he said. “But there’s something else in there, too, that’s a big part of it.” He shrugged and held up his hands helplessly. “It’s organic, but that’s about all I got.”
“Persistence,” I said. “We will find it, mon frère.”
“Is that French again?” he said. “How long are you going to keep doing French?”
“Until the doughnuts get here?” I said hopefully.
“Well, they’re not coming, so zoot alours to you,” he said, apparently unaware that he made no sense in any language, let alone French. But it was not really my place to educate him, so I let it go and we got busy with the sample from the cannibal party punch bowl.
By noon, we had run almost every test we could do in our own small lab, and found one or two useless things. First, the basic broth was made from one of the commercially popular high-octane energy drinks. Human blood had been added in and, although it was difficult to be absolutely certain using the small and badly degraded sample, I was reasonably sure it had come from several sources. But the last ingredient, the organic something, remained elusive.
“Okay,” I said at last. “Let’s go at this a different way.”
“What,” Vince said, “with a Ouija board?”
“Almost,” I said. “How about we try inductive logic?”
“Okay, Sherlock,” he said. “More fun than gas chromatography any day.”
“Eating your fellow humans is not natural,” I said, trying to put myself into the mind of someone at the party, but Vince interrupted my slow-forming trance.
“What,” he said, “are you kidding? Didn’t you read any history at all? Cannibalism is the most natural thing in the world.”
“Not in twenty-first-century Miami,” I said. “No matter what they say in the Enquirer.”
“Still,” he said, “it’s just a cultural thing.”
“Exactly,” I said. “We have a huge cultural taboo against it that you would have to overcome somehow.”
“Well, you got ’em drinking blood, so the next step isn’t that big.”
“You’ve got a crowd,” I said, trying to shut out Vince and picture the scene. “And they’re getting cranked up on the energy drink, drawn in with the ecstasy, and psyched up by watching, and you probably have some kind of hypnotic music playing—” I stopped for a second as I heard what I had said.
“What,” Vince said.