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was a still shot of Wriggles in his underwear lunging at me with his nasty finger. “Can’t wait to see it on YouTube.”
    “She uploaded a video?” I shot a look in Miki’s direction, and realized now why she and the cops were doing so much laughing. “I’m going to kill her,” I growled, and Rauser laughed. “As soon as I get back. Right now I need a backup pet sitter.”
    “You’re going somewhere?”
    “Larry Quinn called today with a job. It sounds interesting.”
    “The cow lawyer? Uh-oh.”
    I walked with Rauser to the breakroom and watched him pour burnt coffee into a cup. I could see the muck inside the pot. He offered me some, but texture is not really what I look for in a cup of coffee. “Somebody up near Lake Chatuge says the crematory put chicken feed and cement mix in their mother’s urn instead of ashes.”
    “You’re shittin’ me. Why?” He took a sip and made a face, then added a ton of powdered non-dairy creamer, which he poured out of a sugar jar.
    “I haven’t come up with an answer to that,” I told him.
    “Motive is usually money,” he reminded me.
    “Where’s the value in cement mix when you’ve got cremains on hand?”
    “What was the explanation?”
    “An employee spilled the real ashes and tried to cover.”
    “Sounds plausible.”
    “Larry doesn’t think so.”
    Rauser made a
humph
sound. “Larry Quinn smells green. You know how he is.”
    “Well, I could use a little green myself, and it means I won’t have to spend the Fourth of July with Mother
alone
.”
    “Ouch. Guilt. Won’t Papa Bear be there to protect you?”
    “Dad can’t help me. I think she beats him.”
    “I hope that runs in the family,” he said, and did that up-and-down thing with his eyebrows.
    “You’re a freak.” I smiled.
    “Can I sleep with you tonight?”
    I touched his rough cheek. “You better.”
    Loud voices from the outer room drew our attention. Through the glass walls we saw Miki with Balaki, Williams, Velazquez, Bevins, and Angotti from Homicide and a handful of other detectives, some I recognized vaguely from Robbery. Some I didn’t know at all. A few uniformed cops had joined the mix, all of them looking up at the wall-mounted screen at the head of the detective cubes. I followed their eyes and saw Steven T. Wriggles slapping himself in the facewith the handcuffs, then my own image leaping out of the way of his filthy finger. My Glock came out. It ended with me telling Wriggles, “I’m not letting that nose of yours in my car.” Text shimmied across the screen:
Booger Bandit Bounty Hunter
. The room came apart.
    “She is
so
kicked out,” I murmured.
    Rauser’s phone rang. He pulled it from a back pocket, listened for a minute. “What kind?” he asked. “Frank, give me the short version.” He waited. “Well, can we get a profile?” He waited some more, let go of a half growl, half sigh, returned the phone to his pocket. “Loutz,” he said, meaning Fulton County’s medical examiner. “Forensic light source picked up some kind of fluid on the Delgado boy’s skin. ME’s gotta send it to the lab.”
    “Where was it?”
    “Left shoulder and the side of his neck.”
    “The boy was on his stomach,” I said. “So this happened while the offender was behind him, probably on top of him during the murder.”
    “Or after,” Rauser said.
    “Was Frank able to exclude anything?”
    “He’s knows it’s not blood.”
    “In this heat and from that position, sweat would be a good bet. Saliva.”
    “Semen or urine,” Rauser added. “They found it by accident. Some kind of fluorescently labeled dye one of the techs had, something they don’t use on skin, ended up on the body. It’s for eyes or something. UV picked up drops and spatter from the fluid under the dye. Frank said it lit up like a Christmas tree.”
    “When will you know?”
    Rauser chewed his lip. “We send everything out now. GBI is back-logged, even on priority cases. Budget cuts have been