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of murder. I would scrutinize the blood at suicide scenes and traffic accidents, but trying to interpret what it meant was like trying to read a foreign language.
    Once, I responded to a call where a woman was lying in a bathtub naked, slashing her wrists. The patterns created by the blood swirling in the hot water intrigued me, but as soon as I set foot in the bathroom she started doing her best to stab me with the butcher knife she was gripping, so I had precious little chance to analyze the watery red pools and ribbons winding over the tile floor.
    Another time, we responded to an anonymous call and found a dead teenage girl in a tub full of ice. She had clearly OD’d, and her drug addict friends had injected milk into her veins, then put her onice before fleeing the scene. (I have never yet seen that trick work, but junkie culture held fast to the belief that cow’s milk would dilute the drug and ice would slow its progress to the brain.) Blood was everywhere, most likely because they had jabbed her repeatedly before they managed to get the milk into a vessel. It was the first time I had seen blood mixed with milk. I noticed from the bright red and white swirls that it interacted differently from the way blood did with water.
    Around that same time, we raided a heroin den in a heavily Mexican section of town. It was summer in Southern California, which meant the heat was relentless. It made the pavement soft under your shoes and filled the air with a hazy, vaporous shimmer.
    It was an oppressive, wiltingly hot afternoon when we pulled up in front of the dilapidated house we were targeting. The users were sprawled around the porch, trying to keep cool with as little clothing and movement as possible. When they saw police cars approaching, they flew into action as if an electric shock had jolted them. We chased them over the lawn and reached the porch just as a shirtless, barefoot man with long black hair slammed the door in our faces. From behind it came panicked yells, the crash of furniture falling over, pounding feet, and someone shouting in Spanish. We heard the distant flush of a toilet, which meant somebody was trying to get rid of contraband in a hurry.
    “Open the door! Police!”
    We rammed our shoulders into the heavy panels, but the man on the other side of the door was throwing all his weight against it to keep it shut. Finally, we kicked it in. The rip of splintering wood filled the stifling air along with a long and agonized wail from the dark-haired man behind it. He fell backward and began rolling on the ground, his face contorted, screaming and cursing in Spanish.
    I looked down and instantly realized why. He had been standing with both hands pressed against the door, one foot back to brace hisweight and the other forward to keep his balance. When the door flew inward, the bottom of it caught the top of his foot, shearing off most of the skin and two of his toenails. Blood was spurting out of the open wounds in his foot with each beat of his heart, making long, spattery red lines on the grimy floor. I paused long enough to notice the linear patterns and to register that a heartbeat was causing them. It was the first time I had ever seen an arterial spurt.
    In the years that followed, when blood pattern interpretation classes began to crop up in the United States, I was always the first to enroll, despite overwhelming skepticism from my colleagues. I would become a charter member of the first American chapter of the International Association of Bloodstain Pattern Analysts, one of only twenty-five believers doggedly persevering on experiments that most law enforcement professionals ridiculed as a far-fetched waste of time but that would later prove invaluable to the field.
    I amassed my knowledge of blood through years spent turning over dead bodies, looking at their wounds, and examining the blood they left behind. Blood pattern analysis is part science, part art. True, you need a solid grasp of math and