“Boss Lady, Boss Lady!’ Dentin’s little boy voice with the white country twang rang from his giant brown bell of a head, “Look!”

Joan awoke to look into the face of Morse’s tablet and see a tangle of naked black and white men-three four or five, she could not tell—jammed into a bathtub snoring, drooling, nuzzling—“What the fuck! You bastard—you bastard!”

Dentin made things worse, “You should have let me take him down and put him out—jus sayin’, Boss Lady.”

The picture was, in effect, an elaborate selfy, accomplished with a very long arm and sick sense of humor. Well, there were two pictures, she discovered, both of them sent out to over 400 law enforcement officers involved in regional first responder trails at the top level. The first picture was a distance shot—probably from the toilet seat, you gross bastard—showing four drunk and stoned tactical cops, including one Baltimore City and one Baltimore County operator she had personally conferred with on the Bracken Case. They were naked, tangled together with faces arranged in crotches and hands placed on butts and other such disgusting poses. The empty liquor bottles they had apparently drunk were arranged above and around them, their badges pinned to the end of the drawn back shower curtain.

In this first photo they did not appear injured.

Dentin was beside himself, “Oh, Boss Lady, I’ve got a hard-on for that racist skinhead!”

“Dentin, please, after viewing this, could we agree to forever strike sodomy metaphors from our machinegun humor lexicon?”

“Yes, Ma’am, but—”

“I know, Dentin, it burns me up too. I can’t believe this asshole reprobate took the selfy.”

“Assaulting and disfiguring an officer, Ma’am, it’s a disgrace!”

Morse was morbidly leaning back over her reclining seat trying to get a better look at the tangle of naked law enforcement beef as Joan switched to the selfy, a close up of a muscular Caucasian ass, moderately foliated with light black hair, showing a speedo tan line, and carved in blood with the bowie knife being held by the grinning bastard that has done the deed—letters dripping blood down the admirably-muscled bottom, next to which grinned the Nazi skull face of Randy Sterling Bracken, half brother of the savage freak who had raped and impregnated Joan while five men beat him and pried him away slathering like some beast—Damn I miss that, you hairy hunk.

Her ears were ringing as she regained focus and measured the grinning skull of the man who she could not seem to hate for trying—who, in some white trash fantasy land would be her brother-in-law, but in her America was her sworn enemy.

Morse noticed her focus on Randy’s grinning face under bloodshot eyes and opined, “He wouldn’t be the first criminal to have a crush on a female investigator. And, if I may exercise my profiling proclivities, he had one Latino, and two black asses that he could have carved your name into—but he chose this set of magnificent cheeks of European descent to inscribe ‘Joan Henderson.’ I must therefore conclude that he has a suppressed desire for your company.”

Dentin’s fist smashed into the dashboard, cracking it, as he let out a bellow of ox-like pain.

Joan was stunned and Morse was launching into an on the job invalidation clinic, “What, Dentin, driving Miss Joan getting to you?”

He snarled as he cut off a casino bus and swerved between two sedans, “I had that gosh durned hillbilly buck—and the lady who let him go gets targeted with humiliation for her good graces. I will whoop that scrawny white ass, I will!”

Morse winked at Joan before they both returned to the morbid selfy and she finally found her voice, “Listen, guys this fiendish hillbilly is as smart as anyone in The Agency. I’ve sat across the table from The Director, and from this bastard too. The Director has nothing on this guy but manners. We will ignore this. He sent out this pic as a screen so that I will be interviewed about my name showing up on this waspish ass. He’s sending out a smokescreen for his brother. Keep your nose to the trail, Dentin. Jay Bracken or whoever the hell he thinks he is at the moment is our target.”

She was suddenly stricken with a womanly thought as the baby moved, and pointing to the carved cop ass asked Morse, "Will this ruin his marriage or..."

Morse's voice was the very syrup of cynicism, "If it does I'll be sure to salute you every time I take off his pants. Seriously, if he is a submissive homo, it's all over for him. Otherwise, he'll get over it."