Jeff Lindsay - Dexter is delicious

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.

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."

"I know what the fuck salvia is," she snapped. "And I never heard of it doing anything but making people stupid for five minutes at a time."

I nodded. "Sure," I said. "But we don't know what it might do in incremental doses, especially combined with all this other stuff."

"And for all we know," Vince added, "it doesn't really do anything. Maybe somebody just thought it was cool to mix it in there."

Deborah looked at Vince for a long moment. "Do you have any idea how fucking lame that sounds?" she said.

"Guy in Syracuse smoked some," Deke said. "He tried to flush himself." He looked at the three of us staring at him and shrugged. "You know, in the toilet."

"If I lived in Syracuse, I'd flush myself, too," Deborah said. Deke held up both hands in an eloquent whatever gesture.

"Ahem," I said, in a valiant attempt to keep us on topic. "The real point here is not why they used it, but that they did use it. Considering the size of the crowd, they used a lot of it. Probably more than once. And if somebody is using it in quantities that large-"

"Hey, we should find the dealer easy," Deke said.

"I can do the fucking math," Deborah snapped. "Deke, get over to Vice. Get a list of the biggest salvia dealers from Sergeant Fine."

"I'm on it," Deke said. He looked at me and winked. "Show a little initiative here, right?" he said. He cocked a finger-pistol at me and dropped the thumb. "Boom," he said, smiling as he turned away, and as he sauntered out the door he very nearly collided with Hood, who pushed past him and came over to our little group with a very large and unattractive smirk on his face.

"You are in the presence of greatness," he said to Debs.

"I am in the presence of two nerds and an asshole," Debs said.

"Hey," Vince objected. "We're not nerds; we're geeks."

"Wait'll you see," Hood said.

"See what, Richard?" Debs said sourly.

"I got these two Haitians," he said. "Guaranteed to fucking make your day."

"I hope so, Richard, because I really fucking need my day made," Deborah said. "Where are they?"

Hood went back and opened the door and waved at somebody out in the hall. "In here," he called, and a group of people began to file in past him as he held the door.

The first two were black and very thin. Their hands were fastened behind them with handcuffs, and a uniformed cop pushed them forward. The first prisoner was limping slightly, and the second was sporting an eye that was swollen almost shut. The cop gently pushed them over to stand in front of Deborah, and then Hood stuck his head back in the hall, looked both ways, apparently spotted something, and called, "Hey, Nick! Over here!" And a moment later, one last person came in.