"Pick it up," she said, and she nudged it toward him with her foot.

"It's yours," he told her, shaking his head.

"Mr. Spanos," she said, "it is a felony to bribe a police officer."

"What bribe?" he said. "It's a gift. Take it."

"Pick it up, and get it out of here," she said.

"It's one phone call," he said. "Is that such a crime?"

"I am very sorry for your loss," Deborah said very slowly. "And if you pick that up and get it out of here right now, I will forget this happened. But if it is still there when the other detectives come back in, you are going to jail."

"I understand," Spanos said. "You can't say anything right now; that's fine. But take my card, call me when you find them, the money's yours." He flipped a business card to her and Deborah stood up, letting the card fall to the floor.

"Go home, Mr. Spanos," she said. "Take that suitcase with you." And she walked past him to the door and opened it.

"Just call me," Spanos said to her back, but his wife was once again more practical.

"Don't be an idiot," she said. She leaned down and grabbed the suitcase and, with a mighty shove down on the top, just barely got it locked before Deke and Alvarez came back in with the two bodyguards. Mrs. Spanos handed the suitcase to the one with the buzz cut and stood up. "Come on," she said to her husband. He looked at her, and then he turned and looked at Deborah by the door.

"Call me," he said.

She held the door open. "Good-bye, Mr. Spanos," she said.

He looked at her for a few seconds more, and then Mrs. Spanos took him by the elbow and led him out.

Deborah closed the door and let out a loud breath, then turned around and went back to her chair. Alvarez watched her sit, grinning. She looked up at him before he could wipe the smile off.

"Very fucking funny, Alvarez," she snarled.

Deke came over and leaned in the same spot he'd been leaning before the interruption. "How much?" he asked her.

Deborah looked at him in surprise. "What?"

Deke shrugged. "I said, how much?" he said. "How much was in the suitcase?"

Deborah shook her head. "Half a million," she said.

Deke snorted. "Chump change," he said. "Guy in Syracuse tried to give my buddy Jerry Kozanski two mil, and it was only a rape."

"That's nothing," Alvarez said. "Few years ago one of the cocaine cowboys offered me three million for the junkie that stole his car."

"Three million and you didn't take it?" Deke said.

"Ah," Alvarez said, "I was holding out for four."

"All right," Deborah said. "We lost enough time with that shit. Let's get back to it." She pointed at Alvarez. "I got no time for your crap. I want Bobby Acosta. Go get him."

And as Alvarez sauntered out the door, I thought that suddenly half a million dollars didn't seem like that much money, not for an entire eaten daughter. And because it was such a small amount, it also seemed like it wouldn't be such a big deal to take it from Spanos for something so trivial as a simple phone call. Yet Deborah apparently felt absolutely no temptation, and even Deke acted like it was something funny and commonplace, nothing at all out of the ordinary.

Apparently Debs agreed. She straightened up and looked right at me. "Let's get this done," she said. "I want to know about that stuff-you called it punch. The stuff we found in the Everglades. It's part blood, but whatever else is in it might lead somewhere. Get on it."

"All right," I said. "What are you and Deke doing?"

She looked at me with a repeat of the bad-lemon glare she'd given Deke. "We," she said with a distaste that matched her expression, "are going to hit the last three names on the list from that dentist. The guys who had the vampire fangs put in." She glanced again at Deke and then away, clamping her jaw tight. "Somebody knows," she said. "Goddamn it, one of those boys knows something, and we're going to get it from him."

"All right," Deke said softly.

"Well, then," I said, "I'll toddle off to my lab and get busy."

"Yeah," Deborah said. "You do that."

I did that, leaving my sister with her unwanted partner.

NINETEEN

Vince Masuoka was already bustling around when i got to the lab. "Hey," he said. "I ran my ecstasy test on that stuff from the Everglades?"

"Wonderful," I said. "Just what I was going to suggest."

"So it's positive," he said. "But there's something else in there, too, that's a big part of it." He shrugged and held up his hands helplessly. "It's organic, but that's about all I got."

"Persistence," I said. "We will find it, mon frere."

"Is that French again?" he said. "How long are you going to keep doing French?"

"Until the doughnuts get here?" I said hopefully.

"Well, they're not coming, so zoot alours to you," he said, apparently unaware that he made no sense in any language, let alone French. But it was not really my place to educate him, so I let it go and we got busy with the sample from the cannibal party punch bowl.

By noon, we had run almost every test we could do in our own small lab, and found one or two useless things. First, the basic broth was made from one of the commercially popular high-octane energy drinks. Human blood had been added in and, although it was difficult to be absolutely certain using the small and badly degraded sample, I was reasonably sure it had come from several sources. But the last ingredient, the organic something, remained elusive.

"Okay," I said at last. "Let's go at this a different way."

"What," Vince said, "with a Ouija board?"

"Almost," I said. "How about we try inductive logic?"

"Okay, Sherlock," he said. "More fun than gas chromatography any day."

"Eating your fellow humans is not natural," I said, trying to put myself into the mind of someone at the party, but Vince interrupted my slow-forming trance.

"What," he said, "are you kidding? Didn't you read any history at all? Cannibalism is the most natural thing in the world."

"Not in twenty-first-century Miami," I said. "No matter what they say in the Enquirer."

"Still," he said, "it's just a cultural thing."

"Exactly," I said. "We have a huge cultural taboo against it that you would have to overcome somehow."

"Well, you got 'em drinking blood, so the next step isn't that big."

"You've got a crowd," I said, trying to shut out Vince and picture the scene. "And they're getting cranked up on the energy drink, drawn in with the ecstasy, and psyched up by watching, and you probably have some kind of hypnotic music playing-" I stopped for a second as I heard what I had said.

"What," Vince said.

"Hypnotic," I said. "What's missing is something to put the crowd into a receptive mental state, something that, you know, works with the music and everything else to make them suggestible in the right way."

"Marijuana," Vince said. "It always gives me the munchies."

"Shit," I said as a small memory popped into my head.

"No, shit wouldn't do it," Vince said. "And it tastes bad."

"I don't want to hear how you know what shit tastes like," I said. "Where's that book of DEA bulletins?"

I found the book, a large, three-ringed notebook into which we put all the interesting notices sent to us by the DEA. After leafing through it for just a few minutes I got to the page I remembered. "There," I said. "This is it."

Vince looked where I pointed. "Salvia divinorum," he said. "Hey, you think so?"

"I do," I said. "Speaking from a purely inductive-logic standpoint."

Vince nodded his head, slowly. "Maybe you should say, 'Elementary'?" he said.

"It's a relatively new thing," I told Deborah. She sat at the table in the task force room with me, Vince, and Deke standing behind her. I leaned over and tapped the page in the DEA book. "They just made salvia illegal in Dade County a couple of years ago."