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