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fighting the urge to punch his buddy. “It’s rush hour,” he said, and he sounded a little testy. “What’s a suspicious vehicle in this mess?”
    “If I have to tell you that,” Debs said, “maybe you should transfer to code enforcement.”
    Vince said, “Boom,” very softly, and the cop beside Cochrane made a choking sound as he tried not to laugh.
    For some reason, Cochrane didn’t find it quite so amusing, and he cleared his throat again. “Lookit,” he said. “There’s ten thousand cars going by, and they’re all slowing down for a look. And it’s raining, so you can’t see anything. You tell me what to look for and I’ll start looking, all right?”
    Debs stared at him without expression. “It’s too late now,” she said, and she turned away, back to the blob in the Crown Vic. “Dexter,” she called over her shoulder.
    I suppose I should have known it was coming. My sister always assumed that I would have some kind of mystical insight into a crime scene. She was convinced that I would know instantly all about the sick and murderous freaks we encountered after one quick glance at their handiwork, merely because I was a sick and murderous freak myself. And so every time she was faced with an impossibly grotesque killing, she expected me to provide the name, location, and social security number of the killer. Quite often I did, guided by the soft voice of my Dark Passenger and a thorough understanding of my craft. But this time I had nothing for her.
    Somewhat reluctantly, I sloshed over to stand beside Deborah. I hated to disappoint my only sister, but I had nothing to say about this.It was so savage, brutal, and unpleasant that even the Passenger had pursed its glove-leather lips with disapproval.
    “What do you think?” Deborah said to me, lowering her voice to encourage me to speak frankly.
    “Well,” I said, “whoever did this is off-the-charts insane.”
    She stared at me as if waiting for more, and when it was clear that no more was coming, she shook her head. “No shit,” she said. “You figured that out by yourself?”
    “Yes,” I said, thoroughly annoyed. “And after only one quick glance through the window. In the rain. Come on, Debs, we don’t even know yet if that’s really Klein.”
    Deborah stared inside the car. “It’s him,” she said.
    I wiped a small tributary of the Mississippi River off my forehead and looked into the car. I could not even say for sure that the thing inside had ever been a human being, but my sister sounded quite positive that this amorphous glob was Detective Klein. I shrugged, which naturally sent a sheet of water down my neck. “How can you be sure?”
    She nodded at one end of the lump. “The bald spot,” she said. “That’s Marty’s bald spot.”
    I looked again. The body lay across the car’s seat like a cold pudding, neatly arranged and apparently intact, unpunctured. There were no visible breaks in the skin and no apparent blood spill, and yet the pounding Klein had taken was total, terrible. The top of the skull was perhaps the only part of the body that had not been shattered, probably to avoid ending Klein’s life too quickly. And sure enough, the fringe of greasy hair around the bright pink circle of bare skin did look a lot like what I remembered about Klein’s bald spot. I would not have sworn an oath that it truly was, but I was not a real detective like my sister. “Is this a girl thing?” I asked her, and I admit I said it only because I was wet, hungry, and annoyed. “You can tell people apart by their hair?”
    She glanced at me, and for one terrifying moment I thought I had gone too far and she was going to attack my biceps with one of her ferocious arm punches. But instead, she looked over to the rest of the group from Forensics, pointed at the car, and said, “Open it up.”
    I stood in the rain and watched as they did. A shudder seemed togo through the whole group of watchers as the car door swung open; this