But then she picks up a blood spatter cast-off pattern and says, “The angle of impact suggests the weapon was a hammer, but the void pattern indicates the perp wiped it with a cotton blend. Probably a t-shirt.”

If I end up on a slab next week with a neat little needle mark in my neck, tell the world I died doing what I loved: wearing a Hawaiian shirt and talking about the refractive index of semen.

But this summer? The universe played a joke on me. A glorious, statistically improbable joke.

Dexter gave her his usual “friendly neighborhood sociopath” nod, and she whispered to me, “His bio-rhythms are off.”

Here’s the weird part. Every time my boy Dexter (the blood spatter analyst, not the intern—stay with me) walks into the room, Intern Masuka gets very stiff. She stares at his shoes. She stares at his gloves.

Despite the creepy vibes, the girl is a . She organized my reagent shelf alphabetically and by molecular weight. She found a trace of soil on a victim’s shoe that Batista missed. She even laughed at my “What do you call a fake noodle? An impasta!” joke.