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marveling at the iron control that keeps me from attacking him for his ninny-hood.
    “That’s all we need,” Vince said. “A maniac with a sledgehammer and a hard-on for cops. Jesus.”
    I would not have brought Jesus into the discussion, but naturally I’d had the same thoughts as I stood there turning into a small piece of Florida’s aquifer. Even when someone was beaten to death, we had never before seen it done so savagely, so thoroughly, and with such maniacal focus. Among all the annals of Miami crime fighting this was unique, unmatched, brand-new, never seen before—until this evening, when Detective Klein’s car had appeared on the shoulder of I-95 at rush hour. But I saw no point in encouraging Vince to make any more witless and obvious remarks. All clever conversation had washed out of me in the steady flow of the rain pouring into my clothing through my flimsy jacket, so I just glanced at Vince and then returned to concentrating on maintaining my solemn face: furrow the brow, turn down the mouth—
    Another car slid to a halt beside the patrol cars already parked there on the shoulder, and Deborah got out. Or to be more formallycorrect, Sergeant Deborah Morgan, my sister, and now lead investigator on this new and dreadful case. The uniformed cops glanced at Debs; one of them did a double take and nudged the other, and they moved aside as she stalked over to look inside the car. She was shrugging on a yellow rain jacket as she walked, and that did not endear her to me, but she was, after all, my sister, so I just nodded at her as she passed, and she nodded back. And her first word seemed carefully chosen to reveal not merely her command of the scene, but a picture of her true inner self as well. “Fuck,” she said.
    Deborah looked away from the mess in the car and turned her head toward me. “You got anything yet?” she said.
    I shook my head, which caused a small waterfall to roll down the back of my neck. “We’re waiting for you,” I said. “In the rain.”
    “Had to get the sitter,” she said, and shook her head. “You should have worn a poncho or something.”
    “Gosh, I wish I’d thought of that,” I said pleasantly, and Debs turned back to look at the leftovers of Marty Klein.
    “Who found it?” she said, still staring through the Crown Vic’s window.
    One of the officers, a thick African-American man with a Fu Manchu mustache, cleared his throat and stepped forward. “I did,” he said.
    Deborah glanced at him. “Cochrane, right?”
    He nodded. “That’s right.”
    “Tell me,” she said.
    “I was on routine patrol,” Cochrane said. “I spotted the vehicle in its present location, apparently abandoned on the shoulder of Interstate 95, and recognizing that it was an official vehicle, I parked my patrol unit behind it and called in the tag. Receiving confirmation that it was indeed a police vehicle signed out to Detective Martin Klein, I exited my patrol vehicle and approached Detective Klein’s vehicle.” Cochrane paused for a moment, possibly confused by the number of times he had said “vehicle.” But he just cleared his throat and plowed on. “Upon arriving at a point where I could make a visual surveillance of the interior of Detective Klein’s vehicle I, uh—”
    Cochrane stumbled to a stop, as if he wasn’t sure what the correct word might be in report-ese, but the cop beside him snorted andsupplied the missing word. “He hurled,” the other cop said. “Totally lost his lunch.”
    Cochrane glared at the other cop, and harsh words might have been spoken if Deborah had not called the men back to their purpose. “That’s it?” she said. “You looked inside, threw up, and called it in?”
    “I came, I saw, I blew chunks,” Vince Masuoka muttered beside me, but happily for his health Deborah didn’t hear him.
    “That’s it,” Cochrane said.
    “You saw nothing else?” Debs said. “No suspicious vehicle, nothing?”
    Cochrane blinked, apparently still