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respectable-looking people dressed for church; a couple of school portraits of kids, smiling hopefully; two graduation pictures, one boy, one girl, clearly brother and sister; and one formal portrait of a middle-aged woman with deep-set eyes and a glossy flip to her hair. All the people in the pictures were black. The wall and the pictures were speckled with little dots of red-brown, as if someone had goosed a can of spray paint to test the nozzle. There was one brad sticking out of the wall with nothing hanging from it, and a rectangular area of clear wall with no spots, obviously a place where a picture had hung.
    A crime-scene technician came into the room lugging a fat carryall, waved to Paz, and departed. A few seconds later came another CSU guy with a camera. Paz said, “Hey, Gary, did anyone take a picture off that wall? Where the nail is?”
    “Not that I saw, unless somebody snatched it before we got here.”
    “Okay, I’ll ask. You done in there?”
    “Yeah,” he said, then paused. “Jimmy, you’ll want to catch this guy.”
    “We want to catch all of them, man.”
    “Uh-uh, Jimmy,” said the technician. “I mean you’ll really want this one.”
    He left and Paz went into the bedroom. There was nothing in the tiny room but a cheap white-painted “brass” bed, a white pine bureau, and two people, one of whom was dead and one of whom was Paz’s partner. Cletis Barlow was a fiftyish white man built on Lincolnesque lines, one of the ever fewer representatives on the Miami PD of the original population of Florida, an old-time cracker. Barlow looked like a redneck preacher, which he was, on Sundays. He had been a homicide detective for nearly thirty years, and had in common with Jimmy Paz little more than street smarts and a strong stomach.
    “The M.E. been yet?” asked Paz, staring at the thing on the bed.
    “Been and gone. Where were you?”
    “It’s my regular day off, Cletis. Monday? Yours too, I thought. I was going to my mom’s. Why did we catch this thing?”
    “I was hanging around and picked up the phone,” said Barlow. Paz grunted. He knew that Cletis Barlow refused point-blank to do servile labor on Sundays, so he often filled in the hours he would have been docked during what would otherwise have been his regular day off. Paz asked, “What did the M.E. say? Who was it, by the way?”
    “Echiverra. He figures she’s been dead a couple of days. This is Deandra Wallace. She was supposed to go over her momma’s house this morning. Her brother come by to see her when she didn’t show or answer her phone. And he found her like this. They were going to go shopping. For the baby.”
    “Uh-huh,” said Paz, and moved closer to the bed. The remains were those of a young woman, perhaps twenty years old, with smooth chocolate skin. She was nude, lying on her back, arms at her sides, legs extended. There was a gold bracelet on one ankle and a gold chain around her neck, with a tiny golden cross on it. Her breasts were solid, round, and swollen. Her hands were encased in the usual plastic bags, in the event that she had touched her killer in some evidentiary fashion. When murdered she had been in the most advanced state of pregnancy. The flowered sheet on which she lay was red-black with blood and there was a pool of solidified blood on the floor. Paz was careful not to step in it.
    “There’s no baby,” said Paz.
    “No. The baby’s in the sink in the kitchen. Take a look.”
    Paz did. Barlow heard him say, “Ay, mierditas! Ay, mierda! Ay, Dios mio, condenando, ay, chingada!” which, as he understood no Spanish, meant nothing to him. What Paz said when he came back was, “My goodness, what a terrible thing!” When you worked with Cletis Barlow, you did not use the name of the Lord in vain, at least not in the official language of the state of Florida, nor utter any foul speech. Cletis would not work with anyone who did not conform to his standards, and Jimmy Paz could not afford to