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Deborah shook her head. “You know you can’t,” she said.
They stared at each other for a moment, then his eyes clicked onto me. It was exceptionally hard for me to look back without blurting out something like, “Oh, what the hell—go for it!” But I managed somehow, and Doakes turned the pistol up into the air. He looked back at the thing, shook his head, and put the pistol away. “Shit,” he said. “Shoulda let me.” And he turned, walking rapidly out of the room.
Within the next few minutes the room became crowded with people who tried desperately not to look while they went to work. Camilla Figg, a stocky, short-haired lab tech who had always seemed to be limited in expression to either blushing or staring, was crying quietly as she dusted for fingerprints. Angel Batista, or Angel-no-relation as we called him, since that is how he always introduced himself, turned pale and clamped his jaw tightly shut, but he stayed in the D E A R LY D E V O T E D D E X T E R
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room. Vince Masuoka, a co-worker who normally acted like he was only pretending to be human, trembled so badly he had to go outside and sit on the porch.
I began to wonder if I should pretend to be horrified, too, just to avoid being too noticeable. Perhaps I should go out and sit beside Vince. What did one talk about at such times?
Baseball? The weather? Surely one wouldn’t talk about the thing we were running from—and yet, I found to my surprise that I would not mind talking about it. In truth, the thing was beginning to raise a mild twitch of interest from a Certain Interior Party. I had always worked so hard to avoid any kind of notice at all, and here was someone doing just the opposite.
Clearly this monster was showing off for some reason, and it may have been only a perfectly natural competitive spirit, but that seemed a little irritating, even while it made me want to know more. Whoever did this was unlike anyone else I had ever encountered. Should I move this anonymous predator onto my list? Or should I pretend to swoon with horror and go sit outside on the porch?
As I pondered this difficult choice, Sergeant Doakes brushed past me again, for once barely even pausing to glower at me, and I recalled that because of him I had no chance to work through a list at the moment. It was mildly disconcerting, but it did make the decision seem a little easier.
I started composing a properly unsettled facial expression, but got no further than raising my eyebrows. Two paramedics came rushing in, all focused importance, and stopped dead when they saw the victim. One of them immediately ran from the room. The other, a young black woman, turned to me and said, “What the fuck are we supposed to do?” Then she started crying, too.
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You have to agree she had a point. Sergeant Doakes’s solution was starting to look more practical, even elegant. There seemed very little point in whisking this thing onto a gurney and dashing through Miami traffic to deliver it to a hospital.
As the young lady had so elegantly put it, what the fuck were they supposed to do? But clearly somebody had to do something. If we just left it there and stood around like this, even-tually someone would complain about all the cops throwing up in the yard, which would be very bad for the department’s image.
It was Deborah who finally got things organized. She persuaded the paramedics to sedate the victim and take it away, which allowed the surprisingly squeamish lab techs to come back inside and go to work. The quiet in the little house as the drugs took hold of the thing was close to ecstatic. The paramedics got the thing covered and onto their gurney without dropping it and wheeled it off into the sunset.
And just in time; as the ambulance pulled away from the curb the news trucks started to arrive. In a way it was a shame; I would love to have seen the reaction of one or two of the reporters, Rick Sangre in particular. He had been the area’s leading devotee of “If it bleeds, it leads,” and I had never seen him express any sense of pain or horror, except on camera or if his hair was mussed. But it was not to be. By the time Rick’s cameraman was ready to roll, there was nothing left to see other than the little house fenced in by the yellow tape, and a handful of cops with clamped jaws who wouldn’t have had much to say to Sangre on a good day, and today probably wouldn’t have told him his own name.
There was really not a great deal for me to do. I had come in Deborah’s car and so I did not have my kit, and in any case D E A R LY D E V O T E D D E X T E R
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there was no visible blood spatter anywhere that I could see.
Since that was my area of expertise, I felt I should find somethin
g and be useful, but our surgical friend had been too careful. Just to be sure I looked through the rest of the house, which wasn’t much. There was one small bedroom, an even smaller bathroom, and a closet. They all seemed to be empty, except for a bare, battered mattress on the floor of the bedroom. It looked like it had come from the same thrift shop as the living-room chair and had been pounded flat like a Cuban steak. No other furniture or utensils, not even a plastic spoon.
The only thing that showed even the smallest hint of personality was something Angel-no-relation found under the table as I finished my quick tour of the house. “Hola,” he said, and pulled a small piece of notepaper off the floor with his tweezers. I stepped over to see what it might be. It was hardly worth the effort; nothing but a single small page of white paper, ripped slightly at the top where a little rectangle had been torn away. I looked just above Angel’s head and sure enough, there on the side of the table was the missing rectangle of paper, held to the table with a strip of Scotch tape. “Mira,” I said, and Angel looked. “Aha,” he said.
As he examined the tape carefully—tape holds fingerprints wonderfully well—he put the paper on the floor and I squatted down to look at it. There were some letters written on it in a spidery hand; I leaned over farther to read them: LOYALTY.
“Loyalty?” I said.
“Sure. Isn’t that an important virtue?”
“Let’s ask him,” I said, and Angel shuddered hard enough that he almost dropped his tweezers.
“Me cago en diez with that shit,” he said, and reached for a plastic bag to put the paper into. It hardly seemed like some-
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thing worth watching, and there was really nothing else to see, so I headed for the door.
