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.
THREE
THE TEST I NEEDED TO RUN TO FIND OUT IF THE BLOOD was human was a fairly basic one, simple and relatively quick, so I stopped for lunch even though Deborah had told me not to. Just to keep things righteous, it was only a take-out sandwich, but after all, I had nearly starved myself at the hospital, and I had rushed away from Lily Anne to work on a day off, so one small Cuban sandwich did not seem like too much. In fact, it seemed like almost nothing at all, and I finished it in the car before I even got off I-95, but I arrived at my little laboratory in a much better mood.
Vince Masuoka was in the lab staring at something under a microscope. He looked up at me when I entered and blinked several times. “Dexter,” he said. “Is the baby all right?”
“Never better,” I said, a combination of truth and poetry that pleased me more than it should.
Apparently Vince did not agree; he frowned at me. “You’re not supposed to be here,” he said.
“The pleasure of my company was requested,” I said.
He blinked again. “Oh,” he said. “Your sister, huh?” He shook his head and then ducked back down to the microscope. “There’s fresh coffee,” he said.
The coffee may have been freshly made, but the grounds had apparently been sitting in a vat of toxic chemicals for several years, because the stuff was as close to undrinkable as something can be and still be liquid. Still, life is a series of trials, and only the tough survive them, so I sipped a cup of the wretched stuff without whimpering as I ran the test on the blood sample. We had several vials of antiserum in the lab, so it was only a